The Government and employers could face wage increase demands of "10, 15 and 20 per cent" from workers on the shop floor if they refuse to renegotiate the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, SIPTU president Mr Des Geraghty has warned.
He was speaking at the union's western regional conference in Galway at the weekend, where delegates called for the national minimum wage to be increased to £5 an hour from January 1st instead of September 2002. Mr Geraghty said the union leadership would take the proposal "on board" in its meetings with the other social partners on the PPF.
"Of course we don't want to go back to the 1970s," he said. "We know that when you talk about inflation it's the people on fixed income, not the stockbrokers or the bankers, who are affected - they can do all right. The victims of inflation are those on social welfare, fixed income or on the basic increases of the PPF."
He denied "the economy would run wild" if the unions secured a 5 per cent increase, and added: "If we don't get a pay increase through the PPF we'll get it on the shop floor". The national agreement "was predicated on low inflation and dependent on strong economic growth. The level of economic growth has exceeded expectations significantly, but unfortunately so has the rate of inflation. We are demanding what we negotiated is delivered to the people who voted for it."
But Mr Geraghty warned employers who were "complaining" about the 5 per cent additional increase sought by the unions that, "If they force us back into a free-for-all it'll be 10, 15 and 20 per cent we'll be looking for.
"Industrial production is way up and there is no question but that profits have been rising faster than wages. Now we've cracked the employment problem we will be pressing for profit-sharing. Revenue is up by £1 billion and this comes from our pockets - it is not coming from corporate taxes, that's because they're taking more from PAYE. Therefore there is an extraordinarily good basis for our arguments.
"We have thousands of members who didn't get an increase yet. Those in distribution and hotels are not due until December. Public sector workers will only get their increase next week. We asked the employers to bring forward those increases and we got a `No'.
"We are proud of the fact that our branches and shop stewards, in employments where there is change, have been turning in good agreements over and above the PPF - and long may that continue. We don't want to break it - we want to work within it because there are budgetary commitments in this and the next Budget and we want them delivered on."
He told delegates: "We in SIPTU are absolutely committed to achieving a prosperous society - the elimination of poverty, an investment in people, as well as infrastructure, roads and transport. With so much corruption and scandals going on all around us, we must renew our commitment to achieve a truly prosperous Ireland. "We have made enormous progress in job creation, in leading the way in a managed economy. But we don't forget that there is injustice in our society also, homelessness and drug abuse and it's close to us on the streets of Dublin. Our commitment to national bargaining is about a truly inclusive society, one which is actually seeking to achieve prosperity and fairness for everyone.
"We've been conscious of the attack on SIPTU coming from the farmers and from economists. We built a strong economy. The Central Bank, which didn't know there was a rip-off in their own back yard, and the IFA should know better - employers should know better. I was pleased to tell Tom Parlon during the week we have members who are farmers. Fifty per cent of farmers have to join the labour market to survive and many more look to our union for a better standard of living.
"SIPTU has no objection to the IFA seeking improvements for those in rural societies. We didn't say it was inflationary when they got more money from meat factories and from Europe."
The Labour TD for Galway West, Mr Michael D. Higgins, told the conference that urban and rural decay was taking place side by side with massive investment in the provinces. "The rural decay of villages and towns is one side of the coin. The other is the increasing volume of urban dis-economies created by an uncritical acceptance of a speculatively driven urbanisation. These are two sides of the same phenomenon and reveal the absence of a spatial policy.
"It is a further problem that within this vacuum capital allocations are made within a limited physical framework that ignores social and cultural realities. "Capital investment is needed but so is a strategy for enabling communities to address, in an inclusive way, the anomalies that are affecting people of all ages."