Management at Dublin Airport has moved to avoid industrial action by staff angered at issues around late payment of wages.
On Friday, Siptu said its worker representatives had “declared no confidence in their management” and had begun preparations to ballot for industrial action.
It said the dispute had arisen over “the repeated failure to pay staff wages on time”.
In a statement on its website, the union said worker representatives had taken the steps at a meeting on Thursday, pointing to irritation with the company’s MyTime pay system.
“This week, wages for thousands of airport workers that were due to be paid on Wednesday 21st September did not arrive in their accounts on time,” said organiser Karan O Loughlin.
“This debacle is the latest in a series of ongoing and consistent irregularities with the payment of wages to our members. These have included under payments, overpayments or no payment at all.”
However, in response, DAA said it had apologised and addressed the delay in payment of wages, and insisted issues with the MyTime system were separate and related to a cyberattack.
“Employees had their pay transferred to their respective accounts on this fortnight’s scheduled ‘pay day’ of Wednesday, September 21st, albeit a little later in the day than normal,” a spokesman said.
“As soon as we became aware there was an issue with the bank transfer, we immediately informed all 3,000 plus employees and their trade union representatives and we worked with our bank to ensure payments would still be made to staff that same day.”
The company said the payment issues were “completely separate” to those relating to the third party pay system run by Kronos, which it said had been affected by a cyberattack last December, and which had led to ongoing issues.
“Management has been in regular and frequent contact with all our trade union partners as we worked through the issues caused by that outage and the resultant manual processes that were necessarily put in place at a time of rapidly accelerated international travel with hundreds of new employees joining the business as a result,” the spokesman said.
Acknowledging concerns raised by Siptu, DAA called for a withdrawal of threats of industrial action.
