MOST Irish Life sales staff are due to return to work this morning as unions and management digest an arbitration agreement reached by the Employer Labour Conference on Monday.
But SIPTU, which has 34 workers involved in the dispute, is unhappy with the terms of reference by which the agreement was reached. A spokesman said members were not prepared to accept a "diktat" in which they had no involvment.
Mr John Tierney, National Secretary of the MSF union, representing the majority of the strikers in the 17-week-old dispute, said the document - binding on his 270 members - contained a major section on "rebuilding trust in the organisation".
"We have actually increased the package by about a million pounds. It is the settlement and that is it, whether we like it or not, we are bound by it," he said. However, he agreed that some MSF members might not abide by the union stance.
The document contains a recommendation that both sides commit themselves to the Partnership 2000 section on "the development of a high trust environment between employees and managers". The conference's steering committee had IBEC and ICTU representatives under the chairmanship of Prof Basil Chubb
An Irish Life spokesman said the document was complex and would require some days before the costings and overall implications could be gauged. "We were happy to engage in the process and we were happy to go for binding arbitration," he said.
Mr Frank O'Malley, branch secretary of SIPTU's insurance and finance branch, said the union had had no involvement in the Labour Court or Employer Labour Conference proceedings. The union's offer of making a submission to the conference and being consulted on the outcome had not been accepted.
Members would decide on the development at a general meeting on Friday or next week, he added.
According to an Employer Labour Conference (ELC) statement, the emphasis in its decision is "on finding a new way forward to ensure that this type of dispute does not occur again
"The ELC believes that much of the underlying cause of this dispute arises from a breakdown of trust between both sides and the ELC believes that this represents one of the key challenges to be addressed in moving forward to ensure that trust can be rebuilt."
