ESB unions to meet on Thursday to plan ballot for industrial action

The ESB group of unions will hold a special meeting on Thursday to discuss how to proceed with a ballot for industrial action which members voted for at the weekend.

The motion for industrial action, including possible strike action, was unanimously passed at a special delegate conference in Dublin on Saturday. Brendan Ogle, group secretary of the ESB group of unions, said the dispute centred on the pension plan.

Speaking on RTÉ’s This Week programme yesterday, he said an agreement was reached between the unions and management in 2010 that the staff pension would remain in a defined-benefit scheme but the company later sought to change this.

He said the unions rejected the idea but the ESB went ahead and described it in its annual accounts as a defined-contribution scheme. Mr Ogle said the scheme had a €1.6 million deficit .

A spokeswoman for the ESB said the company would not be commenting on the decision to ballot for industrial action. When the dispute initially arose, ESB said its actuaries had confirmed the scheme could meet its liabilities and said the Pensions Board had approved a plan that would eliminate the minimum funding standard deficit by 2018.

Mr Ogle said it was a serious situation. “ESB staff who joined the scheme before 1995 have no State pension. ESB staff rely on the scheme for all of their pension entitlements and, in a wind-up situation, an ESB staff member on a salary of €60,000 with 30 years’ services stands to have an annual pension of €675 a year or €13 a week. That is the situation that ESB has allowed to develop.”