A nationwide campaign to defend occupational pensions was called for at the ICTU conference yesterday.
Twelve times as many young workers are being forced into inferior defined contribution pension schemes as are able to join defined benefit schemes which provide guaranteed superannuation payments, the Ictu biennial conference in Bundoran was told yesterday.
The leader of the TEEU, the country's largest craft union, Eamon Devoy, said that when it was considered that most new recruits to defined benefit schemes were in the public sector, the discrepancy was even greater. He said that with defined contribution schemes, the employer was left facing little or no liability.
"What makes the tough new attitude of so many employers even more indefensible is that these cutbacks are not financially necessary. They are part of an attack on terms and conditions of employment generally.
"Put simply, many employers want to sustain their profits in the global competitive environment by adopting a semi-detached attitude to their workers. They want employees to become a variable rather than a fixed cost in their relentless pursuit of profits," he said.
Mr Devoy said that employers were engaging in all kinds of deceit to con workers in order to make the change from defined benefit to defined contribution schemes more attractive.
Meanwhile, congress voted unanimously in favour of the introduction of a mandatory pension scheme for all workers to be funded equally by employers, employees and the Government.
Ictu vice-president Rosheen Callender said that it was time for the Government to stop pussy-footing around on the pension issue. She said that the Government should publish its Green Paper on pensions which had been languishing for months and look at the report on mandatory pensions.
The National Union of Journalists told the conference that the local radio sector was an area of low pay and high exploitation.
Irish Secretary Séamus Dooley said that low pay rates had led to a high turnover of staff. He said that the union was aware of at least one case where a person had left local radio to work for McDonald's as the pay was better.
Mr Dooley also said that the union was looking at the area of people working on placements for nothing in radio stations.
He advised trade unionists to ask radio staff if they were being paid before agreeing to give interviews. The trade union Impact told the conference that the issue of the employment of agency staff was no longer confined to the private sector but was also increasingly a feature of the health service. National secretary Kevin Callanan said it was feared that this could trigger a race to the bottom in terms of pay and conditions.
Siptu president Jack O'Connor said that crucial decisions on the economy had to be taken now to move away from an overdependence on construction and borrowing and towards a more skilled workforce. Moreover, it was important to curb the greed of wealthy groups such as developers who threatened to undermine competitiveness, he added.
He said that there were indications that credit-led growth was evaporating in the face of accelerating interest rates and inflation.