PATIENTS in most Dublin hospitals will probably have to forgo hot meals today because of a strike by 3,500 SIPTU members. Hospital staff are being asked to bring sandwiches to work.
Union members are to stop work from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. in the first of a series of stoppages in pursuit of a claim for an improved pension scheme. SIPTU has agreed to provide emergency cover today, but this is not expected to extend to catering.
About 80 health centres are also affected by the dispute, but are not expected to be badly disrupted.
The dispute is being regarded seriously by the employers' organisation, IBEC, which says it challenges the industrial peace clause of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work.
Some hospitals will provide a cold dinner for patients, supplemented in some cases with hot soup cooked before SIPTU staff withdraw their labour. Other hospitals may provide a hot meal in the evening, when the four hour stoppage ends.
Union and management representatives met at major hospitals throughout Dublin yesterday afternoon to discuss the precise level of emergency cover that would be provided. At one stage it looked as if SIPTU would provide no cover.
In most cases the level agreed is extremely low. In St Vincent's, for instance, management says that only two out of 100 portering staff will be available during the stoppage.
Non emergency admissions, out patient clinics and day ward services will be curtailed. At Beaumont hospital, X rays for non emergency patients will be among the services affected.
SIPTU branch secretary Mr Matt Merrigan says that in the event of the national disaster plan having to be invoked at any of the main Dublin hospitals, his members would immediately return to work.
Meanwhile, IBEC has written to SIPTU and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions complaining that the action breaches the industrial peace clause of the PCW.
IBEC represents the voluntary hospitals, which provide much of the accident and emergency cover in the capital. It believes that this dispute as well as action being threatened by nurses and civil servants is going beyond the pale of "social partnership".
In his letter to the ICTU general secretary, Mr Peter Cassells yesterday, the industrial relations director of IBEC, Mr Turlough O'Sullivan, said SIPTU's action was not only contrary to the peace clause of the PCW but "would not be taking place if all concerned had adopted the voluntary code of practice on dispute resolution in essential services, introduced more than four years ago".
In a separate letter, the director general of IBEC, Mr John Dunne, has written to the general president of SIPTU, Mr Edmund Brown, expressing "extreme disappointment" at the union's action. It had very wide economic implications, he said.
However the deputy general secretary of SIPTU, Mr Jimmy Somers, has rejected the IBEC claims. He says that emergency cover is being provided and that the PCW allows unions to pursue claims industrially in a number of areas, including pensions.
"We did so already, a year ago at Trinity College, where there was a threat of industrial action over pensions," be said. That dispute was resolved without strike action.
The SIPTU dispute over pensions predates the PCW and is not specifically provided for in the industrial peace clause of the PCW. On the other hand, IBEC can argue that the clause commits unions to promoting industrial harmony.