Croke Park deal poses challenges, says union

A BALLOT for industrial action would be virtually certain if the Government sought to introduce further pay cuts for public service staff, a leader of one of the main trade unions in the Civil Service has said.

Speaking last night at an annual conference, the deputy general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union, Billy Hannigan, said there was no doubt everyone would expect the union to stand up and resist further attacks on pay and conditions.

However, he urged delegates to remit a motion calling for a ballot on industrial action in the event of the Government further reducing salaries, increasing the pension levy or cutting increments for current or future members of the union.

He said this was not because the union was afraid of standing up for members but that the preferred option would be for a joint programme of action with other public service unions in such an eventuality. The preferred position was that members would not be balloted before everybody else, he said.

The union’s general secretary, Tom Geraghty, said public service unions had given tentative consideration to what would happen when the Croke Park agreement expired in 2014.

He said the public service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions wanted to get into the space of undoing some of the unfair cuts introduced in 2009 and 2010.

He said one of the first things would be to address the pension levy, which had created all sorts of anomalies.

Union president Valerie Behan said reforms to sick leave arrangements, allowances and frequency of salary payments, which had been flagged by management under the Croke Park deal, were all potentially problematic. However, “the circumstances of our time generate new and necessary challenges”.

“Of course, the agreement poses challenges. Issues such as possible changes to sick leave arrangements, changes in some allowances, changes in the frequency of salary payments, possible structural or grading changes in the Civil Service have all been flagged and are all, potentially, problematic.

“However, we have processes in the agreement to enable us to deal with all problems, either through agreement or through binding third-party adjudication.”

Ms Behan said the Croke Park agreement had been described accurately as the most successful productivity agreement the State had ever seen.

However, she said the agreement had been subject to a constant barrage of criticism from certain sections of the media, while the rest of the media was “indifferent about the facts”.

It had whipped the public into a frenzy of fear about the implications of the retirements of staff from the public service at the end of February. She said there had been no apology for scaremongering and no admission from the media that it had got things badly wrong.