The general secretary–designate of the electricians' union, the TEEU, has said it has received an extraordinary level of support from other workers” for its current strike against contractors.
In an address to the biennial delegate conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) in Tralee, Eamon Devoy said workers in factories where there was no dispute and where there were no electrical contractors on site had asked the union to place pickets so that they could come out in support of the electricians.
He said there were still some factories closed where contractors were based on site because staff were refusing to pass the picket placed by electricians.
“We did not ask those workers to stay out. We did not put pickets on to prevent them [from going to work]. They are staying out in solidarity," he said.
Mr Devoy said if the electricians won their dispute with electrical contracts – and he said they had to win it – it was his belief that it would be won for every worker in the country. He said the dispute was continually being misrepresented as a pay claim. However, he said the contractors had secured money from the clients under the contracts that they had, and they had withheld it from his members.
Mr Devoy signalled that electricians’ pay would fall over time in line with trends in the private sector - to which wage levels are officially compared. However, he said the electrical contractors wanted to fast-forward this process.
“We do not negotiate on electricians’ pay. There is a process. And there is no negotiation whatsoever. We look at rates of pay in 16 companies and if those rate of pay happen to go up then the rates for electricians go up. Equally, if they goes down then the rates of pay for electricians go down."
“Obviously as rates of pay are going down in the private sector through different arrangements that are taking place at the moment, in the course of time the electricians’ pay will go down,” he said. “They want to skip a year or two and cut their pay at this stage.”
Mr Devoy said the employers wanted to reduce that level of pay agreed for 2006/07 by 10 per cent and also to introduce significant cuts to other earnings such as apprentice pay, shift pay and overtime.
“This is not just an attack on electricians, it is an attack on all workers in the country,” he said. “There is a policy by Government, property speculators, the banks, the builders and the contractors to drive down wages in this country as some sort of solution to the economic woes and to keep the eye off the Government whose responsibility it is to address this in a fair way.”
To much applause from delegates, Mr Devoy said there was “one particular captain of industry” who was responsible for the current dispute. “I want to say that he knows more about cows and slaughtering cows than he does about workers’ rights”, he said.