Private sector, even?
To be fair, private sector pay in comparable jobs had, prior to benchmarking, substantially outdistanced public sector pay. To my own knowledge, in the late 90s and to about 2003-ish, a lot of civil servants - at all levels - were leaving to take up other jobs, frequently at very much higher salaries (of four people I knew well enough to know of details, I think all but one had salary increases of over 50%). I think this, on a macro scale, was part of the reason for the benchmarking exercise.
Nor do I see any time lately that civil servants have held the country to ransom, though a number of other public sector area have had strikes.
A real problem with the benchmarking model is that while benchmarking followed certain private sector salaries on the way up, there is insufficient recognition of the risk premium in the private sector, and no real mechanism for public sector salaries to follow those same private sector salaries back down.