It is too soon to assume it will be rejected, but there is a gut reaction against plan for reform, writes MARTIN WALL
THE DEAL on public service pay and reform agreed between trade unions and the Government last month at Croke Park is not dead yet, but there is no mistaking that it is in very serious trouble.
No ballots have yet been held on the proposals and not all union executives have considered the deal formally. However, assuming that the members of unions’ governing executives and delegates who attend annual conferences are reflective of the mood on the ground, it is obvious that there are serious concerns at grassroots level about the terms of the Croke Park agreement.
For this deal to stick, it will likely require significant numbers of civil and public servants on the ground to go against the view of various union executives that the proposed agreement is not “sellable” to members.
Even as they left Croke Park in the early hours of Tuesday morning of the week before last, some senior union negotiators privately told industrial relations correspondents that while the deal was the best that could be achieved, there would be “casualties” and that it would not be accepted by everyone.
It was generally assumed that those most likely to oppose the deal included the CPSU, which had recently engaged in the dispute at the Passport Office, and some of the teacher unions who were about to hold their annual conferences. Another union earmarked for rejection of the deal was Unite, which had consistently voted against partnership agreements over the years.
True to form, the executives of teacher unions TUI and the ASTI opposed the deal. The CPSU executive will make its decision on Monday, but is likely to recommend rejection.
The executive of Unite is formally expected to recommend rejection of the deal when it considers it on Monday. Yesterday, representatives of Unite’s public service members came out strongly against the deal.
However, while all public service unions will hold ballots on the deal, ultimately its fate will be decided by the overall Public Services Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. It has been generally expected that the decision would be taken on the basis of a simple majority, but that the vote of the 12 public service unions will be weighted according to their membership levels.
Therefore, the general assessment was that even if the lower-paid clerical grades represented by the CPSU or some of the teacher unions voted against it, the larger unions with their bigger numbers would steamroll the deal through.
No one expected that the central executive of Impact, one of the most pro-partnership of unions and whose respected general secretary Peter McLoone was one of the chief architects of the Croke Park deal, would reject the proposals. The shock decision of Impact’s executive on Thursday evening changed the dynamic and all previous forecasts have had to be rethought.
As things stand, the executives of four unions, the ASTI, TUI, Impact and Unite either have rejected the Croke Park deal or will do so within the next few days.
The executives of three other unions, the PSEU, which represents mid-ranking civil servants, the primary teacher’s union, the INTO and the Association of Higher Civil and Public Servants have backed the proposed pay and reform agreement.
The executive of the CPSU will meet on Monday to make its recommendations, while crucially the national executive of Siptu, the country’s largest union, will consider the issue on Tuesday.
At this stage, it is premature to write off the Croke Park deal as being dead in the water. However, the momentum appears to be with the no side. One public sector union leader who has recently completed a consultative process said yesterday that there was a “gut opposition to this deal, which has appeared to come from nowhere”.
The specific reasons for opposing the deal varies from group to group. However, most of those intending to vote no point to what they describe as the uncertainty in the proposals – particularly the requirement to implement the reforms upfront, while the reimbursement of the pay cuts is not explicitly guaranteed.
Following the decision by Impact’s executive, attention will now focus on Siptu, the country’s largest union, which is to consider the deal at executive level next Tuesday and on the 40,000-strong Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, which is also due to meet early next week.
Siptu president Jack O’Connor has not publicly made a recommendation on the deal in advance of the meeting of his national executive. However, he has told members in an internal document that the choice they faced was whether to “continue the fight with a view to a better outcome or alternatively adopt a medium-term strategy achieving security on jobs, pay and pensions, as well as providing a framework for reinstatement of the agreed pay scales over time”.
“It is not a question of ending the campaign. The issue is how best to continue with it. We can escalate the action which is at the point of moving to extensive withdrawals of labour. This could result in a better outcome, but it will not produce reinstatement of the pay scales in the short term,” he maintained.
Other sources indicated yesterday that the Siptu executive was unlikely to reject the deal, although it could make no recommendation or leave it to the separate divisions of the organisations to decide.
Siptu was happy with elements of the deal it negotiated in the talks, particularly changes to proposals for outsourcing of work and the introduction of five over seven-day rostering in the health sector.
Senior trade union figures, who have crunched the numbers, yesterday forecast that the INMO could now play a pivotal role in deciding the fate of the pay deal.
These sources argued that if the nursing union rejected the deal and assuming that the results of the various union ballots were along the lines of the recommendations of their executives, the deal would be rejected at the Public Services Committee by five or six votes.
The results of the ballots will not be known for over a month in some cases, and it is likely that those in support of the deal will regroup from the current setback and argue at local level that there is no real alternative other than an escalating campaign of industrial action – a move that may or may not prove palatable to the grassroots.
The Government, for its part, is hoping that when push comes to shove, ordinary members will swallow any objections and vote for the deal as the best that can be achieved, irrespective of the recommendation of the executives.
However, informed sources on both the union and management side have indicated that the Government has signalled privately that if it came to a serious industrial relations battle over public sector pay, it would have to win the dispute if it was to retain credibility with the bond markets on budgetary policy.
Martin Wall is Industry Correspondent