IMPACT CONFERENCE:THE GENERAL secretary of the country's largest public sector trade union has predicted a tight vote from its members on any new national pay deal.
Addressing Impact's biennial delegate conference in Kilkenny yesterday, Peter McLoone said the union's members had traditionally supported social partnership deals by a large majority.
However, he said that a vote on any new deal to emerge from the current national pay talks would represent the first opportunity for members "to vent their anger and frustration" .
"It is going to be very difficult to bring this ship to dock," he said.
Mr McLoone also told the conference that he believed that a new national pay deal was achievable but that it also had to include progress on social objectives and public services.
He said that there was a wide gulf between unions and employers on pay and that he was under no illusion about the enormous challenges that the social partners faced in the current round of negotiations.
But he said that social partnership was a robust process with a proven track record of resolving seemingly intractable problems.
Mr McLoone said that any new pay deal would have to protect living standards and be weighted in favour of the low paid. He maintained that it would also have to address the fallout from the recent benchmarking report under which most public servants received no special increases.
He also said that securing measures to dramatically improve the regulation of employment agencies and agency workers would be "a deal breaker", while the unions also wanted the restoration of representation rights which had been diluted by a Supreme Court ruling in a case involving Ryanair.
The Impact chief said that he was realistic enough to know that the handling of pay and benchmarking would have a big influence on how members voted on any proposed agreement.
Mr McLoone also told the conference that public servants were convinced that the zero increases they received in the benchmarking report was a pre-determined outcome. He said the benchmarking body had deliberately changed its methodology to ensure a zero outcome. He said that this had enraged public servants who had bought into a process which they had believed was a fair comparison with the private sector.
"Benchmarking is dead in the water if anyone thinks public servants will ever sign up to a pre-determined outcome again," he said. The conference passed a motion seeking a genuine review of the public sector pay determination system as part of the current national pay talks.
The Impact conference also passed motions seeking an urgent review of the Government's decentralisation programme.
Impact national secretary Louise O'Donnell said that at a time when the Government was urging people to tighten their belts, decentralisation was "the big white elephant sitting in the corner of the room".
"No one knows how much it is costing the taxpayer to maintain this white elephant particularly when we are still purchasing fields and empty buildings. The Government just this week reaffirmed its commitment to the decentralisation programme, even though it is 75 per cent behind schedule, a full two years after it was due to be fully completed. This is tantamount to folly," she said, adding that it was time "to stop the madness".
"We are calling on the Government to initiate a review of the process," she said.