The overwhelming majority of middle-grade civil servants recognise the necessity of holding on to the Croke Park agreement with both hands, the president of the Public Service Executive Union has said.
In an address to the opening day of the its annual conference in Galway, Valerie Behan said the entire effort of the PSEU and other public service unions was directed at the maintenance of the protections on jobs and pay rates set out in the deal.
“Our task now and for the foreseeable future will be to work to the terms of that agreement, to ensure that services can be maintained and even enhanced, despite the massive reductions in public service numbers that have occurred already and that will continue to occur. That will not be easy and it will create difficulties.”
“However, we are now subject to outside control, beyond our elected Government. That means, inevitably, that there will continue to be cuts in public expenditure,” she said.
“Our Government has lost the right to make alternative choices. If we are to protect our members’ rates of pay and maintain their job security, we have to show that the Croke Park agreement can deliver. We have done so up to now and we will rise to meet those.”
Ms Behan also defended the union’s, successful, move in recent months to challenge the Department of Finance’s proposals to abolish privilege days – additional days off on top of annual leave – for some grades in the Civil Service.
She said the controversial decision by a Civil Service Arbitration Board to back trade unions in their opposition to the move had received “way too much media attention, which was scarcely warranted, given the general context”.
“I do wonder, however, at what point it became unreasonable for us to be unwilling to simply give away hard earned annual leave? We have shown that we are ‘up’ for major and meaningful change but we are entitled to draw a line in respect of issues that are of no great benefit to the Exchequer, but are of great benefit to our members.”
She said union members had “no reason to apologise for our continued efforts to advance the cause of equality and to seek to protect work-life balance arrangements”.
Ms Behan said her union’s membership base was in decline on foot of the reductions in numbers in the Civil Service. “We estimate that we lost about 500 members in 2010. There is no reason to believe that there will be any slowdown in that process.”