Sir, - In the interesting series of articles published in your newspaper under the heading "Pay and the Public Service", none of the contributors mentioned that there are many thousands of public service workers engaged in essential jobs in our health services, local authorities and other public bodies, whose starting pay amounts to no more than £12,066.10p a year and who must wait 11 1/2 years to reach £12,733. This is despite "catch up" increases negotiated earlier this year.
However, the most striking piece of data you published related, not to public service workers exclusively, but to the declining share of GDP going to workers generally. Reliable data (OECD Economic Outlook Database) shows the profit growth rate increasing from 25.1 per cent to 34.8 per cent between 1987 and 1996. Employers may rush to point out that average net industrial earnings have increased by approximately 18 per cent over the past three years, but this has been for the most part due to the tax cuts negotiated by the trade unions.
The unprecedented economic growth over the past few years has been characterised by the rapidly increasing productivity of Irish workers. There is little evidence of much inclination from employers to share the benefits of growth with their employees, despite the framework provisions of P2000 which would enable them to do so. On the contrary, recent trade union recognition disputes suggest a sustained strategy to deny workers the right to independent representation and advice.
We are no longer living in a poor country, desperately seeking a route to recovery from catastrophic economic conditions. Clearly the structure and focus of the national programmes to date, with the emphasis on economic recovery and competitiveness, are now obsolete and redundant. The challenge presented now is that of creating a "new model" focused on equitably distributing the benefits of growth, promoting fairness in the workplace and justice in society.
I respectfully suggest that Mr John Dunne and his colleagues in the Irish Business and Employers Confederation might be better served by exercising some of their undoubted intellectual talents in considering how employers are going to play a role consistent with the responsibilities that should accompany the significant benefits that have accrued to them as a result of workers' co-operation in the National Programmes. For example:
When are they going to face up to the reality that workers have a Constitutional right to organise?
When will they give employees in successful enterprises a reasonable share in the profits they are producing, in terms of reasonable pay increases and/or other measures?
When are they going to acknowledge the need for a special flat-rate increase to improve the relative position of low-paid workers?
When are they going to recognise employees as stakeholders (as envisaged in P2000), with a right to a say in the deployment of profits so as to enhance the prospects for prosperity and security of their own jobs?
Mr Dunne and his colleagues in IBEC would be better employed facing up to their responsibilities than resorting to the old "divide and conquer" tactics of setting workers in the private and public sectors at each other's throats. - Yours, etc., Jack O'Connor,
Unity Hall, Church Street, Tullamore, Co Offaly.