SIPTU is to ballot staff in the Great Southern Hotel Group on strike action "on the basis of the privatisation of any hotel". The decision was taken at a meeting on Monday evening of staff representatives and shop stewards from the nine Great Southern Hotels.
Documentation will go out this week to 1,400 members of the union, about half of whom work full-time in the group. The results of the ballot will be known before Christmas.
"This is obviously because of the threatened sale of the Torc. But the ballot concerns the privatisation of any hotel in the group," said Mr Donal Tobin, SIPTU branch secretary in Kerry.
The union believes the proposed sale of the Torc Great Southern is the start of the sell-off of the group as a whole.
Mr Éamonn McKeon, chief executive of Great Southern Hotels, has written to union officials to say his announcement to staff of the closure of the Torc Hotel, without informing the unions, did not represent a change in management approach to industrial relations. "A joint approach to the challenges facing our business has never been more vital, as we face into our third successive year of the worse trading I have ever experienced."