Peter McLoone of IMPACT argues that if benchmarking is jettisoned now, public service reform will be set back years.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions' Public Services Committee recently published over 30 fundamental modernisation and change measures that public servants are delivering in exchange for benchmarking payments. These radical reforms will leave no public sector function, procedure or service unchanged.
Most of the commitments were published earlier this year as part of Sustaining Progress. Amazingly, most commentators simply ignored them as they "parroted" off-the-shelf prejudices about public services and the people who deliver them.
Fine Gael now seems to have taken a similar path. Its finance spokesperson, Richard Bruton, was sent a copy of ICTU's analysis. But his article in Monday's Irish Times ("Benchmarking deal squandered chance to deliver real reform") took no account of the detailed case we made.
This attitude damages the public debate and does no service to taxpayers and service users.
The critics seem to have forgotten the highly disruptive public sector strikes of the 1990s. Most of these disputes were fuelled by the prevailing system of public service pay links, which meant increases for nurses led to pay rises for prison officers, gardaí, soldiers and others.
The system stifled modernisation because there was little incentive for Grade B to accept change when its pay rise was automatically linked to that of Grade A. Groups of high-performing public servants, who took on more work and responsibility, could not be rewarded for their increased effort and productivity because of the constraints of the pay link system. And it was impossible to implement effective modernisation and change against a background of industrial action.
Government, economists and commentators saw pay links as the main obstacle to public service reform. Benchmarking is a direct product of this debate and it has successfully seen an end to cross-sectoral pay links. It has also delivered stability in service delivery by tying pay rises to industrial peace.
In the biggest and most thorough exercise of its kind ever undertaken, the benchmarking body used established job evaluation techniques to compare public service jobs with similar work in the private sector. Thousands of public servants filled out detailed questionnaires about their jobs, and their line managers verified the accuracy of their answers.
Hundreds were then interviewed in more detail, while the benchmarking body gathered similar data from a representative sample of over 200 private companies to make comparisons.
It was well-known before it reported that the benchmarking body could not publish the raw data. This is common practice in public and private sector labour market research, because information is collected from private sector firms on a confidential basis. There would have been no report if the benchmarking body had not given this confidentiality commitment. No company in its right mind would have co-operated, and we would still have had the old pay links that everyone identified as the main barrier to reform.
Both the benchmarking report and Sustaining Progress insisted that modernisation and change be independently verified before the bulk of benchmarking payments were made. That process is currently under way.
Separate performance verification groups have been established for health, education, local government and the civil service. These groups include experts and independent chairs from outside the public service.
They will verify progress on modernisation and change and undertake site visits to study directly the impact of benchmarking on public service management and service delivery before reporting to Government.
No further payments will be made unless Charlie McCreevy is satisfied that sectoral reforms are under way and that the industrial peace condition has been met.
It is now more than three years since the benchmarking body was set up. And almost five years will have elapsed between its establishment and the final benchmarking payment in June 2005. Throughout this period, public servants and their unions have been refused any grade-based pay increases. While many private sector workers and self-employed people received substantial pay hikes in the boom years of the late 1990s and early 2000s, public servants were told to wait for benchmarking, "the only game in town".
The cost has been spread over four Budgets. Benchmarking is effectively an investment in immediate and ongoing public service modernisation. Public services are labour-intensive by definition. That's why much of public spending goes into the pay packets of essential and dedicated staff. Without them, there would be no public services.Indeed, the current shortcomings of the system are usually characterised by staff shortages, even where new infrastructure is planned or in place.
Benchmarking is delivering industrial stability, an end to cross-sectoral pay links, the ongoing modernisation that these facilitate, and specific service improvements and changes. It's a good deal for taxpayers and service users.
This massive achievement has taken almost half a decade to develop and implement and it will facilitate modernisation and service quality improvements well into the future.
If benchmarking is jettisoned now, public service reform will be set back years.
Peter McLoone is general secretary of IMPACT and chair of the ICTU Public Services Committee