ESB unions in 'dispute' after talks over cuts fail

STATE ENERGY company ESB’s unions say they are in dispute with the company after efforts to cut €140 million from its payroll broke up in disagreement yesterday.

Management and unions at the company had been in talks since September aimed at cutting €140 million from its €700 million annual wage bill.

The talks ended without agreement after each side rejected proposals put on the table by the other.

Their failure to find a resolution now means that management may not pay profit share and performance-related bonuses due to staff under existing agreements.

As a result, secretary of the company’s group of unions, Brendan Ogle, said yesterday that it has advised management that it is “now in a dispute situation and will consult with their members over the coming period in this regard”.

The ESB group of unions, made up of the ESB Officers’ Association, Siptu, Unite and the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union, said that management intended not to honour the existing agreements, under which there are outstanding payments due from the €340 million profit that the company reported earlier this year.

However, the company argued yesterday that the process was still ongoing.

Its spokesman pointed out that some elements of its existing agreement were being renegotiated as part of that process.

He said while both management and unions agreed that the company needed to cut €140 million from its payroll, they disagreed about how to achieve this.

The unions put a comprehensive proposal to management at 3am on Wednesday morning.

They say that management subsequently tabled a “final proposal” that effectively rejected their solution.

As a result, the unions withdrew their proposal on Wednesday afternoon and the talks ended without agreement.

They had already run six days past their original deadline of November 24th.

The company told its staff earlier this year that it had to cut costs to compensate for the impact of losing 800,000 customers to an increased number of rivals over the previous two years.

The markets in which the State-controlled business is operating have been almost fully deregulated.

Another State entity, Bord Gáis, and the Scottish Southern Energy-owned Airtricity began competing with it for domestic electricity customers in 2009.

That market was the last to be fully deregulated earlier this year.