Public service unions have warned there will be a “very volatile industrial relations climate” in the months ahead unless the Government agrees to a new process to deal with pay and other issues.
Unions representing more than 300,000 State employees have been engaged in preliminary talks with Government officials over recent months on “sectoral bargaining” to try to address problems in specific parts of the public service in advance of negotiations, likely to take place next summer, on an overall successor to the existing pay agreement.
However Kevin Callinan, the general secretary of Fórsa, the largest public service union, said there had been no final agreement as yet on the establishment of such a sectoral bargaining arrangement.
Mr Callinan said the public service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had told Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe at a "frank but cordial" meeting before Christmas that they were now "at a crossroads".
“If we can’t close this out at the start of the new year, we are into a very volatile industrial relation climate in the public service,” Mr Callinan told The Irish Times.
Teachers’ strike
He said unions had told the Minister the preliminary engagements on whether a sectoral bargaining process would be established had “gone on far too long and that this was unacceptable”.
The Government is already facing a potential one-day strike by members of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland in February over the two-tier pay system in schools.
Mr Callinan said the unions believed if there was a sectoral bargaining process created for the first four months of 2020, it would allow issues to be aired, discussed and addressed within certain cost parameters and that this would assist in the process of trying to negotiate a wider public service deal in the summer.
He suggested issues such as the pay disparity for staff recruited in recent years to the public service – an issue particularly acute for the teaching unions as teachers continued to be taken on during the moratorium on recruitment following the economic crash – as well as “other austerity measures that were applied unevenly” in particular sectors could be looked at as part of the proposed sectoral bargaining process.
Wage rises
Mr Callinan argued that, given the growth in the economy, wage rises in the private sector were now significantly outpacing increases on offer to public service personnel.
He said the Irish Congress of Trade Unions was recommending that members in the private sector seek increases of 3.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent next year.
Most staff in the public service will receive a 2 per cent rise next October prior to the expiry of the current pay agreement with the Government at the end of 2020.
Mr Callinan said he would expect the public service unions to have a similar target to their colleagues in the private sector when it came to negotiations on a new deal with the Government.
He added that the public service unions could have sought to improve the pay terms of the current agreement or to seek an acceleration of the phasing of rises under the accord. However, he said the unions had instead sought to stabilise the current agreement in a way that recognised the challenges posed by Brexit and had focused with the Government on a potential sectoral bargaining process that would produce outcomes to feed into negotiations on a wider deal.
He said the unions recognised the Government’s budget last October was drawn up on the basis that there was a real possibility of a no-deal Brexit.
However Mr Callinan said the no-deal Brexit risk was receding and “this situation is no longer tenable”.
