Impact urges members to back industrial action

TRADE UNION Impact, which represents mainly public servants, has appealed to its members to support widespread industrial action planned for the end of this month.

In a weekend e-mail to members, the union’s general secretary, Peter McLoone, said a Yes vote would provide a mandate for the union to participate in the action. The ballot closes on Friday.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is proposing a one-day stoppage on March 30th in organisations which have not met the terms of the national pay agreement signed last autumn or agreed an alternative arrangement.

Impact has expressed concern that planned HSE cuts of €700 million this year, and expected serious shortfalls in local authority income, would herald widespread job cuts and reduced services.

Mr McLoone said that, in the absence of a social partnership framework for dealing with the effects of those funding shortfalls, industrial action would have to feature in union responses.

“Until recently the social partnership framework has enabled us to deal with difficult situations like this with a minimum of disruption. But we are now in a different situation because the Government and employers have effectively walked away from the social partnership agreement.’’

Mr McLoone said Impact members had been told that, unless an effective and credible social partnership framework was reinstated, an industrial action mandate would provide an important and necessary tool to help defend services, jobs and incomes in the difficult time ahead.

He said, in the absence of genuine engagement from Government and employers, the strike planned for March 30th would send a strong message that workers would not sit back and take the full pain of economic recovery alone.

He said those who led the Irish financial institutions into their reliance on taxpayers, and those who were the major beneficiaries of the boom, had not been asked to bear their fair share of the burden.

The e-mail said the vote for strike action would also be a mandate “to respond to other attacks on jobs, incomes and working conditions as a result of management responses to funding shortfalls in the HSE, local department and agencies’’.