EMPLOYERS, UNIONS and the Government will today resume talks on a new social partnership deal after a week of public arguments.
The parties will hold discussions on employment issues including the highly controversial question of collective bargaining rights for workers in non-union companies.
The talks will also provide a first opportunity for the parties to consider the new EU directive governing pay and conditions for temporary workers supplied to companies by employment agencies.
Employers’ group Ibec had been opposed to any new measures that would restrict the flexibility of companies to take on agency staff and it has not yet fully commented on the new directive.
On Wednesday, the social partners are scheduled to deal with the issue of pay which has been overshadowed by deteriorating economic figures and controversial calls by Ibec for a pay pause in the public sector.
While disagreements between employers and unions over negotiating rights, agency workers and pay have been well flagged for some time, another new and potentially destabilising issue in the talks this week is the prospect of cutbacks in public services.
Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan is to bring budget strategy memorandum to Cabinet tomorrow that is widely expected to trigger a round of cutbacks in public spending for the remainder of this year and next year.
In its platform for entering the new national pay talks, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) sought greater State investment in areas such as health, education and childcare.
The country’s largest public sector union, Impact, has already been engaged in a campaign of industrial action for the last month over recruitment restrictions in the health service and the reaction of the trade union movement to further unilateral cutbacks is unlikely to be positive.
Asked last week about signals given by Taoiseach Brian Cowen that “relatively painful” cutbacks were on the way, the general secretary of Impact, Peter McLoone, said that measures such as a general public sector recruitment embargo, on which there had been much speculation, could not simply be imposed if the social partners were seeking to put together a framework around which all of the partners could work.
“If the Government is going to take those kind of measures then it is effectively saying that we are going to do that outside of the social partnership framework and then we are left to react to that in whatever way that we can,” he said.
However, speaking last week, Ibec’s outgoing president, Maurice Healy, called for public spending “to be tightly controlled given the reduction in tax revenues”.
He also said that Ibec expected prompt and cost-effective delivery of the National Development Plan.
The talks this week are the first engagement between the social partners since the row last week over Ibec’s call for a public sector pay pause and the warning from unions that the Government had to provide a clear political signal that it wanted social partnership to continue.