WHEN delegates to the 17,000 strong Irish Nurses' Organisation gather at the Limerick Inn for their conference tomorrow the most important question they will have to ask themselves is "What do we want from the Programme for Competitiveness and Work?" The next important question will be "What are we prepared to do to get it?"
Last week they voted by nine to one to reject the PCW pay deal, but it is still unclear what they would accept in its place.
Every nurse seems to have different priorities, but three issues are mentioned more than others. These are the anomaly in the new scales that would leave nursing sisters on lower rates than long serving staff nurses the reduction of pay for new entrants to the profession and the poor early retirement package.
In terms of trade union consciousness and solidarity, the INO has come a long way in the past few years. Although it was founded in 1919 it always regarded itself first and foremost as a professional body. It was only with some effort that the current general secretary, Mr P.J. Madden, persuaded the nurses to register as a trade union in 1988.
By 1990 they had affiliated to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions but priorities remained professional rather than industrial. That has changed. The INO rejected the latest pay offer under the PCW by a higher margin than any other nursing union.
In the past year it has also been involved in a series of local disputes, mainly over staffing levels. From being a union where the leadership had once to bluff and bluster in negotiations about what their members would do to win decent pay and conditions, they have become a work force straining at the leash.
While the latest offer by the Minister for Health, Mr Noonan, to reopen talks will almost certainly be availed of, Mr Madden has made it clear there will be no further deferrals of industrial action. He said yesterday there was overwhelming support for a strike and it could only be averted "by a substantial adjustment from Government" in the £40 million pay offer.
However, whether the nurses decide to strike or not, they will first have to decide what they want to gain from it. They are not familiar with industrial relations issues or the culture of disputes.
Most of the union's members are not acquainted with the complexities of pay restructuring under the PCW, which have generated frustration in the ranks of public service unions whose members have far greater experience of industrial bargaining. Delegates will have to decide their priorities this week, and there is more at stake than just their own pay claim.
For the INO has a unique role this year. It is the first union that will actually be discussing the possibility of national strike action at its annual conference the first union that will have to consider throwing down the gauntlet to the Government and breaking the industrial peace clause" of the PCW.
Whatever delegates decide wills set the tone for the conferences of other public service unions in the weeks ahead and their attitudes to the PCW.