The Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, says that she is open to discussing an Employee Share Option (ESOP) scheme for An Post, similar to that negotiated for Telecom Eireann employees.
She was speaking to journalists after receiving a standing ovation from nearly 400 delegates to the Communications Workers Union conference in Galway yesterday.
Technical details of the ESOP deal in Telecom Eireann were concluded only late on Tuesday, but even if talks had stalled Ms O'Rourke would have received a warm welcome for being the first minister to secure significant progress in negotiations on the ESOP, which have dragged on since 1996.
Telling the delegates of her commitment to the ESOP scheme, which gives 9,000 Telecom employees a 14.9 per cent shareholding in the company, Ms O'Rourke said: "If I do nothing else in my time, I am glad to have done this."
The Minister cancelled plans to attend the a.g.m. of An Post in Dublin yesterday to attend the CWU conference and "meet the workers" in An Post and Telecom. She congratulated the CWU, which represents the vast majority of employees in both companies, for being "the revolutionaries who forged ahead, promoting ESOP despite the difficulties with three government ministers".
Profit-sharing was a natural progression in social partnership, she said, but she cautioned that this was "not a fairytale world where all is rosy. We are all adults and we know we have to move forward. And to move forward we have to be able to change our mindsets."
Turning to restructuring talks at An Post, Ms O'Rourke said that competition would increase next year. Under EU deregulation some £14 million of An Post's parcel delivery business would face challenges from other companies.
When asked afterwards if she would consider an ESOP scheme for An Post as part of a restructuring deal, Ms O'Rourke said: "It could be done". She intended revisiting all the semi-State companies to see what they could do as a group to prepare for deregulation and competition.
The CWU general secretary, Mr Con Scanlon, indicated that the union would be equally flexible at An Post as it had been at Telecom. "In An Post partnership is just as important, but it is not as well understood, particularly by management", he said.