The Irish Bank Officials' Association (IBOA) and Hewlett-Packard (HP) have agreed to meet at the Labour Relations Commission today for talks over threatened industrial action by the finance union.
Members of the IBOA in HP who work on the Bank of Ireland account recently voted by a substantial majority to support all-out strike action for a pay claim.
The two sides were invited by the advisory services division of the LRC to engage in "without prejudice" talks.
The advisory services division is responsible for dealing with a scenario where collective bargaining does not exist but both parties are willing to engage in discussions.
Today's meeting will be an exploratory engagement to see if there is room to resolve the issues. However, IBOA general secretary Larry Broderick warned that the union wanted to see progress on its claim.
"The LRC has invited both parties to talks without prejudice. But as far as we are concerned, the action will proceed unless reasonable proposals are put on the table to address our members' claims," he said.
Limited industrial action notice has been served on HP and comes into effect on Thursday if no progress is made today. It will involve a ban on overtime, on-call, call-out and out-of-hours remote support.
According to the IBOA, the dispute centres on what it said was a failure by HP to honour agreements with the union and, in particular, the refusal to give members what it termed a reasonable salary increase for 2006 and 2007. Bank of Ireland outsourced its mainframe systems to HP in 2003 in a move which saw around 150 staff transfer to the computer company. The IBOA represents the majority of those workers.
