Pay cuts threatened existence of unions, says former leader

PAY CUTS for staff on the State payroll caused an existential threat to the trade union movement, a former public service trade union leader has said.

Blair Horan, who retired this month after 24 years as general secretary of the Civil Public and Service Union (CPSU) – representing lower-paid public service staff – said this period was probably the most challenging in his career.

When social partnership ended there was a view that “just as we had negotiated the increases on the upside, we now had a responsibility to negotiate the reduction on the downside using the same structure”.

He said he was opposed to this view as, on the one hand, the lower-paid would lose out and, secondly, he would not have an organisation if he didn’t as left-wing elements in the CPSU were determined to resist it because of childcare and huge mortgage costs.

“It was a huge existential threat to the movement. We saw that in terms of how other unions had to deal with it. We had huge battles on our own side. Sometimes the biggest battles are not in the management/union negotiations but are in the internal negotiations.”

“We had huge battles on our own side. We never fell out but we had huge battles within the movement. I would be the first to recognise that I was representing people on lower to average pay. Others had to deal with circumstances where they were representing members with a span of income. Also others were probably in sectors more threatened with compulsory redundancies than we were.”

After the pay cuts the CPSU launched a campaign of industrial action in the Civil Service – most memorably in the Passport Office. However, Mr Horan said that despite the huge controversy surrounding the dispute, without it the subsequent agreement that staff earning less than €35,000 would be first to benefit from any reimbursement of the cuts would never have materialised.

Mr Horan said once the commitment on the reimbursement for those earning less than €35,000 had been secured as part of the Croke Park deal, “I was clear in my mind that we had achieved the best that was possible to achieved as a negotiated settlement and I have supported it ever since”.

Mr Horan said he did not think in the next 10 years that there would be any return to the influence the trade unions had under the social partnership.

“I think ultimately the [social partnership] system failed because of the incompatibility between the agendas on the government side as against the other actors. When I look back a social partnership approach was not compatible with the extreme neo-liberal economic policy the government was following and that ultimately brought about its demise.”