Union chief warns Ahern successor 'no pay, no deal'

A SENIOR official of one of the country's main public sector trade unions has said that in the aftermath of the benchmarking report, the Government will only get co-operation if staff get a fair return.

In an address to the annual conference of the Civil Public and Services Union (CPSU) in Kilkenny yesterday, deputy general secretary Eoin Ronayne said that the message to Bertie Ahern's successor as taoiseach would be "no pay, no deal".

Mr Ronayne also said that the issue of outsourcing of traditional civil service work to the private sector would be high on the union's target list for the national pay talks, expected to get under way in the next few weeks.

He said that the union had won a case in the Labour Court against plans by the National Consumer Agency to outsource work without consultation. He said that similar outsourcing moves were under way by management in the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Social and Family Affairs and at An Post.

"I am of the firm belief that we are better to have clear provisions in national deals setting out parameters for outsourcing of our work. Within these parameters we can tackle outsourcing more effectively than if there was no mention at all. Properly policed by representatives and head office we can best protect our core work from being outsourced in this way," Mr Ronayne said.

He added that the union and its members had to be ever vigilant to "harry and hinder often bizarre decisions to outsource work that they had had carried out to the highest standards over the years".

He said that there could not be outsourcing of work "for the sake of feeding the demands of the Ibec private sector employer lobby - it can only happen where our members through full and proper negotiations are happy those proposals make sense and that their long-term interests are protected".

The deputy general secretary also signalled that the union would be seeking reform of the controversial performance verification systems in the public service which are used by management to approve pay awards.

Meanwhile, the general secretary of CPSU, Blair Horan, signalled in his speech to the conferences that the union would not be taking heed of the Government's call for pay restraint in the forthcoming national pay talks.

"Our industry leaders, senior civil servants and Government Ministers have been handsomely rewarded through this neo-liberal excess and they think we should show wage moderation in the forthcoming pay talks," he said.

"Some chance? No chance!" he added.

Mr Horan added that he had concluded that the recent benchmarking body report, which recommended there should be no special increases for most civil and public servants, had been designed to achieve the objective of a zero award.

He criticised the benchmarking body for using weighted average of salary scale points rather than the midpoint on the scale for examining pay in the public and private sectors and for using smaller employers in largely non-unionised workforces to draw comparisons.

"Quite frankly we cannot accept that pay in the public sector should be determined by reference to small employments in the non-unionised sector of the economy," he said.

Mr Horan said that the "most galling injustice" in the benchmarking report was the decision to apply a 12 per cent deduction for the value of public service pensions.

"What the benchmarking report is recommending is that the race to the bottom on pensions begun by unscrupulous employers in the private sector should now be foisted on public servants", he said.

He added that for clerical officers in the Civil Service, the outcome of the benchmarking report was in sharp contrast to that for higher grades who received significant increases under the separate review of top-level pay.

"Today clerical officers at their maximum of scale have €36,667 and a secretary general of a department [level 3] earns €216,516. To restore the 1979 pay relationship which had been constant for 30 years previously would need a 77 per cent increase for clerical officers. That is the scale of the pay explosion for the higher paid," he said.