LABOUR PARTY leader Eamon Gilmore has said the day of public sector unions responding to change by taking industrial action was history.
Speaking at an Impact union conference yesterday, he said the country was in a new era and the best way for unions to protect the interests of their members was by winning the support of the public.
He said there had been recent examples of industrial action in areas of the public sector which had had the effect of alienating the public rather than winning support for the case being made.
Mr Gilmore said change was coming down the track whether people liked it or not, and public sector unions should adopt a new role and lead this change.
Separately, Fine Gael deputy leader and finance spokesman Richard Bruton told the conference he would make no apology for arguing that managers in the public sector should manage or “shape up or ship out”.
He said people managing care for vulnerable people had a huge obligation to perform.
If a principal was tolerating a teacher who was unfit to teach, and who was potentially blighting the futures of 30 children, he had to go if he did not sort out the situation.
This was not an anti-public service comment but he was “not willing to tolerate sub-standard service for children whose future might be blighted by bad management”.
“If we are serious about achieving more in the public sector we have to be tough on managers and expect people to live up to performance standards.
“I think the problem is that very often that as managers you have not been empowered to address problems, and that there are not the systems for dealing with the teacher who is not up to standard.
“We have to give the support to managers to do their job more effectively.”
Mr Gilmore said public service staff had already had to face the levies and recruitment embargo, and further change was in the offing.
“The juggernaut is coming down the track. And when the juggernaut is coming down the tracks sometimes the best way of defending the interest of the members is not by erecting a barrier that it would crash through anyway.
“Sometimes the best way of dealing with the juggernaut is get up and to get control of the steering wheel.
“That is why I say that at this point in time, that with the changes that are now taking place, some of which are inevitable, that there is a new role for public service trade unions.
“It is not a role that is reactive to change but it is a role that is leading the change.”
He believed the time was now for public service unions – representing workers who know better than any Bord Snip where the areas of change could best be made, where the waste could be cut out, where there were new ways of doing things – to lead in that process.
Both Mr Gilmore and Mr Bruton criticised the Government’s new public sector recruitment embargo. The Labour leader described the measure as a “crude instrument” and that in the 1980s a previous embargo had been more flexible in that one post in three was filled.
Impact deputy general secretary Shay Cody told the conference the Government’s new early retirement scheme could “decimate and decapitate public services across the country”.