IRISH Life sales staff are to hold a mass meeting in Portlaoise on Thursday to consider new settlement proposals to their 13 week old strike. Today their branch committee is meeting the Irish Congress of Trade Unions general secretary, Mr Peter Cassells, to discuss proposals to involve the Employer Labour Conference in this intractable dispute.
Yesterday, the branch committee met the Irish secretary of its own union, MSF, Mr John Tierney, to discuss the initiative by the Minister of State for Commerce, Science and Technology, Mr Pat Rabbitte, to involve the ELC. Mr Rabbitte's proposal is that both the company and the sales staff accept binding arbitration by the conference. It has been supported by head office staff at Irish Life, who are also members of MSF but are not involved in the strike.
It is more than a decade since the ELC was convened. The general secretary of the ICTU or the director general of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, Mr John Dunne can request that it be convened. Up to last night the chairman of the conference, Prof Basil Chubb, said he had not been asked to call a meeting but that he was available to do so.
The strike is over proposals to restructure the sales force and, in some cases, redeploy them. All alternative routes to a settlement have been exhausted, including a £2 million package to "buy out" existing practices put forward by the Labour Court. All 300 Irish Life sales staff are involved.
Today's meeting is likely to clarify the procedures under which the case will be heard by the ELC, if the strikers agree to its intervention and binding arbitration.