ANALYSIS:The process may unravel if one of the unions rejects the decision to accept the Croke Park agreement, writes MARTIN WALL
THE GOVERNMENT, some senior trade union leaders and the industrial relations establishment made monumental efforts over recent months to secure a public service pay and reform deal and to have it accepted.
With the agreement negotiated in Croke Park formally ratified by the Public Services Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, arguably a more arduous task now awaits – that of implementing the deal on the ground. The basic principles of the deal are quite straightforward.
The Government has promised there will be no further pay cuts over the four-year lifespan of the deal or any compulsory redundancies in return for co-operation with a wide-ranging programme of work reforms. At the same time, the deal provides the potential for staff to recoup some of the money lost in recent pay cuts from the savings to be generated from the transformation programme.
However, there are considerable uncertainties surrounding precisely how such an arrangement will work.
It is unclear who will be covered by its terms. To date, members of seven trade unions, from teachers and nurses to lower-paid civil servants and other craft workers, have voted against the deal, but they were outvoted by the larger numbers in other unions that accepted it.
While the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation have said they will go along with the majority view, the TUI and IFUT in the education sector signalled that they will not be bound by the committee’s decision.
The TUI will decide its next move at a meeting of its executive on Thursday week, June 24th.
In the event of a union or unions refusing to be bound by the vote of the committee, the Government would be presented with a dilemma as the partial implementation of the deal could end up seeing the entire process unravel. Some senior union leaders believe that in such circumstances, the Government would have two options. It could seek to place unions that are not co-operating with the reforms outside the scope of the protections in the deal. This could mean more pay cuts for members or compulsory redundancies could be on the agenda.
Alternatively, the Government could seek to impose the agreement on all groups, irrespective of whether they supported it. Either action presents its own problems. Cutting pay of certain groups of teachers, for example, would undermine the common pay scale in the education sector.
Such a move would lead to further industrial relations problems, as would attempts to impose change unilaterally. The Government will now appoint an implementation group to oversee the operation of the agreement.
However, there are already arguments about who should be on this body. The Croke Park deal is not an overall social partnership agreement, but a deal between the Government and its employees. As such, it stipulates that the implementation body should be composed of Government and union representatives under an independent chair.
However, employers’ group Ibec has argued that there should be private sector involvement in this process. The Government has so far resisted such a move. Some decisions that are crucial for the operation of the agreement must be made in the coming months.
For example, it will have to be determined whether all the savings generated by the reform programme should be kicked back to staff in terms of restored pay rates or just a portion, with the remainder going to the exchequer. Another key issue will be whether all the savings to go back to the staff will be placed in a single pot and divided evenly across the public service.
This issue has the potential to be divisive as it is likely that in the coming months, there will be arguments from different groups that they are bearing more of a burden under the change programme than others.
The first review of pay under the deal is scheduled for next spring and one reading of its terms would suggest that the level of money to be returned to staff would be based on actual savings generated at that point. However, with six months of 2010 almost elapsed, there would appear to be limited scope for making substantial savings this year.
However, some senior trade union leaders believe that another approach could be taken. This could involve the Government returning to staff the monetary difference between what it would have cost to provide services next year in the absence of a reform deal and the new projected bill once the new efficiency measures are up and running.
This would see financial allocations to departments and agencies scaled back next year to take account of the reform savings, with the difference reimbursed to staff.