Members of the Public Service Executive Union (PSEU) have threatened to escalate a dispute with An Post over a decision by the company to offer personal contracts to sales and marketing staff. Chris Dooley, Industry and Employment Correspondent reports.
Delegates to the union's annual conference in Tralee, Co Kerry, were told yesterday that the company's action was unacceptable and would have to be resisted by whatever action was necessary.
PSEU members have been refusing to co-operate with sales and marketing initiatives by An Post for the past two weeks.
Ms Rhona McSweeney, the union's president, told delegates that the dispute had arisen from "one of the most fundamental issues for any trade union, namely the right of our members to have their pay and conditions determined by collective bargaining".
She added: "The decision by the company to go ahead and offer personal contracts to some sales and marketing staff, despite the rejection of the proposals by the members concerned, is nothing less than an attack on the rights of our members to have their union negotiate on their behalf."
The union was attempting to force the company to "come to its senses" and re-enter the arena of collective bargaining, she said. "If needs be, we will increase the scale of the action to whatever degree is necessary, because this is a dispute that we cannot allow ourselves to lose."
A spokesman for An Post denied that there was any interference with the union's right to bargain for its members. The company had a rewards system in place for senior managers and, while the incentives had been offered to people on grades represented by the PSEU, none had been offered to union members.
The union's action had caused "minor inconvenience" to date, he said.
In her presidential address to the conference, Ms McSweeney said that the new partnership programme, Sustaining Progress, would give PSEU members pay increases of almost 20 per cent over the next 18 months.
While some of the Civil Service reforms contained in the programme had given rise to concern among members, she believed that the deal was the best which could have been achieved.