The Government would be "mad" to drop benchmarking as a means of determining public sector pay, according to the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
Mr David Begg also criticised the Government's decentralisation programme as too ambitious and suggested it should be slowed.
In an interview to be published today, he said benchmarking was of strategic value to the Government in becoming a system of pay determination for the future.
"It has no strategic value if it was simply a once-off thing. So it would seem to me that the Government would be mad not to keep it in place," he said.
The previous benchmarking exercise, which compared public service jobs and pay rates with those in the private sector, resulted in an average pay increase of 8.9 per cent for public servants.
Unions and the Government are committed to holding talks during the lifetime of the current partnership programme, Sustaining Progress, on the terms of reference for a new benchmarking process.
In the interview, in Public Affairs Ireland, Mr Begg takes issue with several aspects of the plan to decentralise 10,300 civil and public servants over three years. That the programme did not coincide with the National Spatial Strategy had perplexed many people, he said.
"And, of course, it has equally perplexed a lot of people that the plan seems to be related, to some extent anyway, to the constituencies of the Ministers responsible for certain Departments."
The programme as planned was very extensive and was too ambitious, he said.
On the threat of public transport disruption by unions, Mr Begg said the public would not tolerate this unless there was a very good justification for it.
