THE COUNTRY’s largest trade union has warned of strikes and industrial action to protect the pension schemes of members.
Addressing Siptu’s biennial delegate conference in Ennis yesterday, the union’s vice-president, Patricia King, warned that “a major catastrophe” was coming in terms of retirement income, which could leave thousands of workers facing penury.
Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore, who is due to address the conference today, will again rule out blanket debt forgiveness for people in mortgage arrears.He will reiterate that the only solution to the problem is one based on a case-by-case approach in which the circumstances of each individual family will be taken into account.
Ms King told delegates the Government had made things worse for people by the introduction of its new 0.6 per cent pension levy. Ms King said she wanted to make clear the union would resist any attempt to make workers pay for this new measure.
“They have lost enough of their retirement savings already and it is a matter for the employers and the pensions industry to meet this cost.”
Ms King said that another, bigger problem “lurking beyond the horizon” was the insolvency of most of the country’s defined-benefit pension schemes, which covered more than 550,000 people.
“The authorities are straining at the leash to impose a funding standard which, in current conditions, will create chaos, resulting in the collapse of many, many pension schemes,” she told delegates.
She said “blind adherence” to a funding standard mechanism designed to condemn thousands of workers to live in poverty in retirement would be a grave mistake.
She said pension funds needed time to recover and initiatives were required such as a “sovereign annuity bond”. “We need direct engagement with the authorities urgently. However, if the pension regulator and others in authority insist on enforcing this [the new funding standard], we will do the only thing we can – in the event of any scheme collapsing – which is to confront the employer directly.
“We will fight on this issue and we will promote industrial action and strikes to preserve pension schemes. If they want chaos, insisting on this funding standard is the way to get it.”
Ms King said Siptu had reached “a certain impasse” in relation to the Croke Park agreement on public service pay and reform.
She said there was now real evidence of resistance by some senior managers to the real change required on the basis that it could affect “minor empires” they had built up over the years. “They are quite happy to implement change – once it affects someone else, namely those at the bottom of the ladder. This union has stated its position on this with clarity to them. We have given all there is to give: now it’s your turn.”
Ms King said she wanted to remind Minister for Enterprise and Jobs Richard Bruton that the union would not stand idly by and let him bring terms and conditions for thousands of workers covered by the joint labour committee system of wage determination down to the lowest common denominator. She said Mr Bruton was presiding over a department which was little more than the downtown office of employers’ body Ibec.
Ms King said the union had made clear it would not accommodate the Minister in agreeing a derogation on the implementation of an EU directive on agency workers until it was satisfied in relation to the future of the joint labour committee and other wage-setting mechanisms. The directive will come into effect from December, unless the Government, unions and employers agree on a specific period for which agency personnel would have to work before the equal treatment rule applied.