The chief executive of the Labour Relations Commission has warned a “considerable” amount of groundwork needs to be done before the Government and unions can enter talks on public sector reform.
Kieran Mulvey said today the commission had a “statutory responsibility to improve industrial relations and to settle disputes”.
As some 70,000 members of Siptu today joined the work-to-rule industrial action by other public service unions, Mr Mulvey said the commission was engaged in “a series of meetings” with particular groups in the public service.
Speaking to The Irish Times, Mr Mulvey said he had established on a confidential basis the views of some of the parities involved but there are "still a lot of issues to resolve before the parties could even contemplate getting around the table."
Later this week Mr Mulvey will meet with public service unions after which he hopes to have a “clearer view” of the potential for talks.
“What I’m hoping to do is see if there’s basis on which pessimism can be replaced by some optimistic developments that possibly that can take place in a number of weeks time when maybe the Government are in a better position to understand how the economy is developing and public service unions are in a position to engage on a broader agenda than budget decisions," he said.
Mr Mulvey said he is trying to explore if there is any basis for a framework where issues can be addressed “down the line” in the context of the next two budgets.
“The unions obviously hold the view that the decisions in the [December] Budget were unilateral decisions amounting to pay cuts and the Government has a very clear it’s not revisiting that.
“Given those stated positions one has to see if there’s any other position that could be developed that would allow the parties to come together.
“There’s no point having a situation where if a framework was created that some of the groundwork hadn’t been done beforehand.
“It’s very hard to conduct negotiations in an atmosphere of mistrust. Where people feel they’ve had, again for the second year running, serious cutbacks in their pay.”
Mr Mulvey said the exploratory meetings were a matter of “testing the waters against the background of an escalating industrial relations situation”.
Earlier on RTÉ's Morning Ireland Mr Mulvey said the Government and unions had had a "very public divorce" and were probably in a "grieving period", adding: "But maybe there's a chance for reconciliation."
He said there came a stage in the process when the parties would have to “eyeball one another” and decide whether they would continue in a “dysfunctional” relationship or whether they were going to get into a forum, or into a room, where they could talk out the issues and return to where the process had broken down.
He said his reading was the Government and unions, prior to the breakdown of partnership talks, had agreed nearly a billion euro in potential savings in the public sector. “What worries me to some degree they [the suggestions for savings] never got a fair airing.”
He said if there had been such substantial agreement around that issue after a very detailed and excessive period of negotiation it would “be the height of folly” to abandon it.
Mr Mulvey also said he believed the Government realised that it was workers who were “taking the pain” of financial cuts and that those affected believed they were not being treated equally. He noted mortgage payments were likely to rise and that inflation would also likely rise later this year.
“We have to protect the economy, the euro is in some difficulty with in Europe. So there are macroeconomic and microeconomic issues that were always trounced out in the context of social partnership. If we got back to a more medium-term plan over the next two years, these issues can be addressed, including the issue of tax."