The leader of the country’s largest trade union has warned public service workers they must be prepared to embark on an escalating campaign of industrial action aimed at securing an agreement with the Government covering reform, job security and a framework for restoring pay rates or they could face more cuts later in the year.
In a speech to a rally of public service workers in Galway tonight Jack O’Connor said that they must lay out a determined programme of action running right into the summer, “carefully and incrementally escalating and ramping it up in such a way as to minimise the implications for ordinary citizens of the country - to the degree that we can - and maximising the prospect of a negotiated outcome”.
“Otherwise we will end up drifting along to the end of the year and into another budgetary assault on jobs, pay and pensions,” he said.
Mr O’Connor said the Government had committed the people of the country to a fiscal consolidation plan which required an adjustment of €3bn one way or the other, “and the reality is that it is far easier to target less than one-fifth of the workforce than it is to confront the powerful and wealthy who dictate the agenda in our society”.
The general secretary-designate of Impact, Shay Cody, told the mass meeting of public servants that unions would soon escalate their industrial action, but that a negotiated settlement was achievable.
He said that if the title of the Government’s financial emergency legislation contemplated that the pay cuts were not forever, the unions needed to convince the Government “that we have to get involved in negotiations to get our money back”.
Mr Cody said the public service transformation deal put forward by the unions last year “could be back on the table if the Government is prepared to agree that the pay cuts can be reversed if equivalent savings are made through public service reforms”.
The general secretary of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, Liam Doran, said if workers did nothing it would guarantee the Government would be back again and again and again
The incoming general secretary of the INTO, Sheila Nunan, said if the unions were to go back into negotiations the establishment renewal of trust was needed.
"Give us back certainty. Tell us that what is going to happen in the budget will have nothing to do with us in terms of our pay. Tell us that we will have certainty in terms of our pensions and give us a timescale for the for the restoration of salaries that have been taken away from us," she said.
Around 700 public service staff from the education, local authority and health sectors attended the meeting. While the audience gave support to speakers from the floor who called for strong action there was also some suspicion from those who attended about the transformation proposals put forward by the unions.
Mr O’Connor said although a fair solution could still be reached between the Government and trade unions, the sands of time were fast running out. He said that such a solution would link better public service provision with stable and secure employment and a framework for restoring the agreed pay scales.
He said the key to arriving at such a deal was a proper negotiation focused on the provision of decent public services within the limits of available resources “completely decoupled from the wider issue of cutting pay across the economy”.
“There will be those who will represent us as endeavouring to reverse the budget and undermine the democratically elected Government. I want to state emphatically that agreement can be reached. We have no more interest in undermining a democratically elected Government regardless as to how much we disagree with it, than we approve of powerful vested interests in business dictating the agenda.”
“However, the Government has equally a responsibility to deal with the issues as presented - to observe good employment practice, to respect agreements freely entered into and to deal properly with its own employees,” he said.
Mr O’Connor said it was not yet too late to avoid a major confrontation and that any such agreement would add enormously to the creation of stability and confidence which, he said, was so urgently required.
However, he told public service workers they must “prepare to take resolute action in an intelligent and carefully planned way in the not too distant future to bring this dispute to a fair conclusion because the sands of time are running, and they are running out fast”.