Public servants to pursue 30-hour working week

The trade union Impact is to pursue a 30-hour week for staff in the public service.

However union officials said this would be “an aspiration” for the medium term rather than an immediate target.

At its biennial conference in Killarney, delegates also supported calls for a reversal of the additional two hours per week which public servants have had to work for free under the terms of the Haddington Road agreement introduced in 2013.

The union is also looking for the complete phasing out of financial emergency legislation, known as Fempi, which was used by governments over recent years to underpin cuts to terms and conditions of public service staff.

However the conference rejected calls for this unwinding of the financial emergency legislation to take place “immediately”.

Dympna Reilly of the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown branch urged the conference to affirm that one of the central pillars of anti-austerity economics was a planned and co-ordinated reduction in the working week.

She urged Impact to campaign in the medium term for a 30-hour working week. She said there was a deliberate vagueness in the motion about the time frame for securing a 30-hour week as it would involve a shift in thinking.

However Ms Reilly said there was some evidence that a 30-hour week or a six-hour day could result in gains in efficiency and productivity.

She said time was not just about money, it was more precious than that. Many union members were “time poor” with little time left for discretionary use, she said.

The union’s Dun Laoghaire Rathdown branch also backed an immediate unwinding of the Fempi legislation.

Delegate Roisin Cronin said that someone earning €30,000 in 2009 had lost €16,500 so far under cuts introduced under Fempi but would gain €920 next year if the legislation was abolished from the beginning of 2017.

She said those on €50,000 had lost €38,000 since 2009 but would gain €4,500 from next year if Fempi was abolished.

Ms Cronin said that by 2018 there would have been eight years of financial emergency legislation.“The Fempi legislation is based on the ideological belief that the public sector is paid too much and it needs to pay for the sins of bankers.”

Impact general secretary Shay Cody said everyone wanted to see the repeal of Fempi. However he warned that an immediate removal could lead to “skewed and unfair” results with higher earners benefitting most.

“The immediate repeal of Fempi would give nothing to those on €22,000 because they are already ahead of where they were when Fempi came in.

“Someone on €30,000 would see a total gain of less than €450 per year while someone earning €125,000 - rare as they are in the public service - would stand to gain almost €20,000.”

He said he was sure that if unions, through some piece of magic, were able to come up with an outcome “as skewed as that, we would be having a debate in this hall to say how could we manage such an unfair outcome”.

He said pay negotiations would have to be designed in a way that the people who would get no or very little benefit from he repeal of Fempi would need to be merged into whatever pay round was put in place.

Nancy Costello ofthe Ordnance Survey urged the ending of the of the additional hours which public servants have had to work for free under recent agreements or that they should be paid for these as alternative.

She said the each day staff in the civil and public service were working collectively an additional 150,000 hours to aid the recovery of the country.

The conference also heard from Irish Congress of Trade Unions general secretary Patricia King who said it was not seeking to revitalise social partnership.

She said it was clear there was a need to revive an employer/labour conference for resolving disputes.

“However on the wider matter of dialogue, I think there are very few in our movement who would be positively disposed towards a mechanism which was designed as a device to control and dampen wage growth, suppress living standards while simultaneously profits continue to rise and gross inequalities remain.”

Ms King said given current economic growth rates, public service pay restoration and the unwinding of financial emergency legislation would have to be accelerated.

“Multiplicity of pay rates for doing the same job is untenable and will have to be addressed through a consolidation process,” she said.

She said the Government’s proposed new Public Service Pay Commission should not interfere with the system of collective bargaining, adding wage-led growth was the only sustainable basis for economic progress.