THE CHIEF executive of the Labour Relations Commission has said a considerable amount of groundwork needs to be done to establish if there is a basis for the Government and public sector unions to enter talks.
Kieran Mulvey said yesterday the commission had a “statutory responsibility to improve industrial relations and to settle disputes”.
As some 70,000 members of Siptu joined the work-to-rule by other public service unions yesterday, Mr Mulvey said the commission was engaged in “a series of meetings” with groups in the public service.
Speaking to The Irish Times, he said he had established on a confidential basis the views of some of the parties involved but there were "still a lot of issues to resolve before the parties could even contemplate getting around the table".
Later this week he will meet 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 a 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.”
Mr Mulvey said he was trying to explore if there was any basis for a framework where issues could be addressed “down the line” in the context of the next two budgets.
“The unions obviously hold the view that the decisions in the Budget were unilateral decisions amounting to pay cuts and the Government is 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, 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 there might be a chance for reconciliation."
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 €1 billion in potential savings in the public sector.
“What worries me to some degree is they 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.