Siptu authorises ballot for strike on public service pay

The country’s largest trade union, Siptu, has authorised its groups in the public service to ballot for strike action over pay.

However, its national executive council has asked the groups to hold off on conducting these ballots until December 1st.

Siptu represents about 60,000 staff across the public service.

The public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu)had urged Siptu to defer balloting members for industrial action for a fortnight to facilitate further contacts with the Government on the pay issue.

Public service unions want the Government to convene talks on a successor to the existing Lansdowne Road agreement early in the new year.

Siptu said on Thursday that mandates for industrial action arising from forthcoming ballots “will be activated unless the Government issued an invitation to talks to the public services committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions”.

“Any such invitation should envisage the commencement of talks not later” than February 1st, it said.

The Government current position is that it will meet trade unions after the new Public Service Pay Commission reports after Easter. The outcome of this process, would, under the Government’s timetable, feed into the budgetary process for 2018.

Labour Court

On Wednesday the public service committee of Ictu maintained that in light of the € 50 million pay offer made to gardaí following a recent Labour Court recommendation, the Lansdowne Road agreement would not now run its full course to its scheduled expiry date in September 2018.

The secretary of the committee, Tom Geraghty, described the pay offer to gardaí, who had refused to enter the Lansdowne Road accord, as a “game-changer”.

However, speaking on Thursday after the meeting of Siptu’s national executive council, the union’s president, Jack O’Connor, said within his organisation there was not a great deal of concern about the pay offer to gardaí.

“There is a widespread acceptance that the gardaí needed an accommodation. I do not think that that in itself would have precipitated the action we decided to take.

“There was a sequence of events and at the outset the most important thing is that we and the representatives of several other unions in the public service have been at pains to try to persuade the Government throughout the past year to come to the table and to agree an acceleration of the rate of pay restoration on foot of the pace of economic recovery and also what was happening elsewhere in the economy. There is a great deal of frustration that that did not happen,” he said.

Mr O’Connor said that irrespective of what had happened in relation to the pay offer for gardaí, “we would probably be in a space not dissimilar from the one we are in at the moment anyway or we would be in it very early in the new year”.