The Government was accused yesterday of displaying a "blatant bias" towards the business sector in the opening of talks on a new national partnership deal.
Mr Jack O'Connor, the vice-president of SIPTU, claimed that even employers were taken aback by the "degree of bias" displayed towards them at Thursday's meeting of the social partners in Dublin. It was this, he said, which had prompted the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation to call for a pay pause after the meeting, "which they hadn't previously sought".
This was denied yesterday by the general secretary of IBEC, Mr Turlough O'Sullivan, who said Mr O'Connor was "wide of the mark".
IBEC had been explaining for several months that pay increases in Ireland were "running three or four times ahead" of those in other EU countries. A pay pause, followed by increases in low single figures, were required to bring competitiveness back into line, he said.
Both the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, and the Minister for Finance, Mr McCreevy, had emphasised the need for pay restraint at Thursday's meeting.
During the meeting, Mr McCreevy told the social partners: "the boom is over.
"The relationship between a general round and benchmarking must be considered in the context of the budgetary pressures facing us.
"We have to be willing to contemplate all options, including the commencement date of any new general pay round."
Mr McCreevy's comments were interpreted as raising the possibility of a pay freeze for public-sector workers.
The cost of paying the benchmarking bill in full has been put at €1.2 billion.
In a particularly hard-hitting speech yesterday, SIPTU's Mr O'Connor said unions were prepared to "take casualties" in defence of workers' rights, if necessary.
"Ideologically-driven opponents" of national agreements with organised labour were gaining influence in IBEC and the Government, he claimed.
If these people got their way, workers, employers and the State in general would pay "a heavy price", he told delegates at a SIPTU regional conference in Galway.
"We will face up to the challenge and I believe we will give a good account of ourselves in the battle to defend workers' rights.
"We will take casualties but we will inflict them as well."
Mr O'Connor, in addition to holding one of the top three positions in SIPTU, is chairman of the private-sector committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
He will be one of the senior union negotiators on behalf of private-sector workers in the talks on a new social partnership agreement, which were formally opened at Thursday's meeting.
He claimed yesterday that the Government and employers were attempting to pin the blame on workers for Ireland's inflation rate, which is more than twice the EU average.
Both, he said, "repeatedly emphasise the need to 'restore competitiveness', deliberately misinterpreting 'competitiveness' exclusively in terms of pay costs when we all know that the word embraces a complex range of factors." He said that they "deliberately disregard the reality that the objective data places average gross pay costs here as low as 14th in Europe and certainly no higher than eighth, depending on the source".
The idea that workers should accept a cut in living standards and sacrifice the gains of recent years "in order to subsidise profiteering by certain elements among the business and professional classes" was "simply not on" and would not happen, Mr O'Connor added.