MORE than 300 Irish Life staff are expected to return to work tomorrow, ending their 17 week dispute with the company. The Employer Labour Conference issued a binding arbitration ruling yesterday evening.
Although details are not being released before staff have an opportunity to study them, it is understood they provide improvements on the existing Labour Court recommendation.
As the arbitration is binding there were no plans last night for the unions representing sales staff, MSF and SIPTU, to hold meetings later today. Although the 320 staff involved in the strike voted by three to one to refer the dispute to binding arbitration, they decided to remain on strike until the findings were issued.
The company has already indicated it will accept the ELC findings. The ELC intervention came at the end of April, at the request of the Minister for Finance, Mr Quinn, and the Minister of State for Business, Science and Technology, Mr Pat Rabbitte.
Mr Rabbitte took the initiative in seeking ELC intervention after clerical and administrative staff at Irish Life called for binding arbitration.
Staff rejected successive settlement proposals put forward by the Labour Relations Commission and the Labour Court to compensate them for accepting changes in the way sales teams operate and are structured. The company accepted the terms, which brought the value of compensation to sales staff from £500,000 to £2 million.
During the dispute, Irish Life is estimated to have lost about £400,000 a week that would have come from the sale of new business.
There is also an estimated £5 million in arrears from contributions normally collected by some of the strikers. Before the intervention of Mr Rabbitte and Mr Quinn the company had been threatening to replace the strikers.
The strikers reacted angrily to a decision by Irish Life to award its executive directors remuneratiod packages worth £1,046,000, an increase of more than 100 per cent on the previous year.
When the increase in the number of executive directors from two to four is taken into account, the rise worked out at an average of 21 per cent each.
However, the company's decision to appoint Mr Niall Saul as human resource director at the beginning of May was seen as a major step towards improving industrial relations in the company. Mr Saul previously worked with Waterford Crystal as group human resource director, where he helped transform an adversarial situation by a proactive partnership approach to problems.
One reason the sales staff were able to maintain such protracted industrial action was that a significant number of them had alternative sources of income. A number also left Irish Life to work for other companies. If any of the strikers renege on their commitment to accept the binding arbitration, they are unlikely to receive the continued support of their unions.