The Government and nurses seem set on a collision course, with industrial action now scheduled for October 19th. In the short term this could mean hospital closures which would put patients' health, and perhaps lives, at risk. In the longer term it could mean the end of the experiment in social partnership which has transformed the economy over the past 12 years.
If there is any doubt about the implications of acceding to the nurses' demands, it should be dispelled by what the leaders of teachers' and civil service unions have been saying since the nurses' Labour Court award was issued last month. As early settlers in the public service restructuring talks, these groups will embark on a round of relativity claims to ensure their members receive increases to match whatever the nurses finally settle for.
It is a very different climate from February 1997 when the initial deal was struck with the nurses on the basis that they constituted a special case and that their £87 million Labour Court award could be ring fenced. The focus is now strictly on pay and there is little emphasis on the vision of modernising the public service through the Strategic Management Initiative, or of breaking traditional public service pay relativities through the restructuring clauses of the Programme for Competitiveness and Work. In his speech last Thursday, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, chose to set the dispute in that wider context. He warned nurses of the consequences of a strike as their unions prepared to ballot them for industrial action. The speech is unlikely to influence many nurses. It has, however, reduced Mr Ahern's room for manoeuvre in the countdown to the strike.
The drift of his argument did not help the Government's case either. Claiming to speak on behalf of "all our people", he said that, "it is not in their interests that individual groups pursue their agendas to the detriment of the wider community". However, many trade unionists, who are overwhelmingly drawn from the PAYE sector, feel that nurses have not been anywhere near as selfish as the banks and wide sections of the business community.
The daily revelations of the various tribunals, the Public Accounts Committee and now the Ansbacher investigation have fuelled a widespread sense of outrage. Nurses were among the groups hardest hit by the cutbacks in public expenditure during the 1980s. They worked on temporary contracts or abroad while tax evasion proliferated among some sectors of society. Unfortunately, a sense of outrage is no substitute for a strategy, something that appears to be lacking in the nursing unions. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in achieving pay increases worth nearly 23 per cent to members and they should tell them so. As the Government has repeatedly warned, the main claim now being put forward by the nursing unions for further long-service payments to staff nurses cannot be met within the terms of Partnership 2000. Ironically, if they succeed, the nurses will only delay further their long-cherished aim of pay parity with paramedics and teachers. As soon as they breach pay guidelines, all these groups will insist on restoring their own relativities. The issue of relativities cannot be resolved within the framework of Partnership 2000. But surely, having lived with the problem for 40 years, the public service unions could endure another few months until the present agreement runs out.
If social partnership collapses in the public service it will not be long before pay rises for everyone are eaten up by tax increases. New tax frauds for the wealthy, recruitment embargoes and pay freezes could then become tomorrow's news. There are some genuine shortcomings in the nurses' Labour Court award, but these should be capable of being resolved without a national strike and all that may follow.