Analysis: Whoever intervenes in the postal dispute will have a lot of history to deal with, writes Chris Dooley, Industry and Employment Correspondent.
The dispute at An Post is likely to get worse, perhaps much worse, before it gets better.
For several months, a major confrontation has been looming between the company and the Communications Workers' Union, which represents 90 per cent of its staff.
The question has been when, rather than if, something would trigger a calamitous dispute.
That "something" duly came to pass at the company's Dublin Mail Centre late on Friday night. Typically, however, the two sides dispute what actually happened.
The union says a work practice change was arbitrarily imposed on staff without agreement.
Nonsense, says the company. Staff were refusing to carry out normal duties, so it had no option but to begin removing them from the payroll.
By yesterday afternoon, 262 people had been suspended, a figure that was expected to rise as more came on duty.
Given that three million items of mail, about 60 per cent of the State's total, are processed at the centre every day, the implications of a failure to settle the row quickly are obvious.
That will surely require the intervention of a third party. But whoever takes on the role will have far more to deal with than the events of the weekend.
The dispute has deeper origins, going all the way back to a 2000 agreement between the company and its unions, titled "Transformation through Partnership".
Key elements of the plan included a 3 per cent pay rise for staff and lump sum payments of £1,500 in return for major work practice changes.
An employee share ownership plan (ESOP) giving workers a 14.9 per cent share in the company was also to be established as part of the deal. For An Post, dramatically reducing a huge dependence on overtime was a major objective of the plan.
Almost since it was signed, both the CWU and the company have been accusing each other of failing to implement the deal.
An Post insists that staff, having pocketed the payments agreed under the plan, have failed to deliver the agreed work practice changes.
The CWU, however, says the work changes were tied to pay and reward packages which the company has yet to finalise for delivery staff.
It was against a background of mistrust on both sides, then, that they sat down to begin talks on a new strategic plan drawn up by the company last year, designed to address mounting losses.
The plan proposes to cut delivery staff by 1,350, about a third of the present number, and to finally root out the long-standing dependence on overtime.
The company wants to have the plan agreed and in place by the middle of this year. Even if it achieves that target, it has warned, it faces an operating loss this year of €30.6 million, on top of a loss of €46.4 million in 2003.
The target is to achieve break-even by 2005 and return the company to profit in the following years. However, talks with the CWU on the plan broke down before Christmas. As ever, the two sides dispute the circumstances. An Post claims the union "jumped out" of the talks without warning. The union says it withdrew after interference in the discussions by the company's chief executive, Mr Donal Curtin, a claim An Post denies.
Whatever chance there was of restarting the talks disappeared in January when the company announced it was pleading inability to pay the 3 per cent pay increase due to staff under Sustaining Progress.
The CWU says it is not prepared to re-enter talks on the strategic plan unless the increase is paid; the company says it cannot afford the increase in the absence of agreement on the plan.
Just over a fortnight ago, the union announced that members had balloted by a six-to-one majority for industrial action, not directly about the Sustaining Progress increase, but two other issues. These are the company's alleged failure to implement the aforementioned pay and reward packages, and the Government's failure to introduce promised legislation allowing for the establishment of the ESOP.
Tomorrow, CWU executive meets to consider when to implement industrial action.
With the postal service already collapsing, the decision might be academic.