ORDINARY WORKING people should not be faced with pay cuts because they did not benefit from the huge economic growth of the past two years, the Siptu meeting heard yesterday.
Proposing the motion that workers take part in the new partnership talks, Siptu vice-president Brendan Hayes said workers had not secured any significant contribution for the economic growth of the past 27 months.
"The people who made the profits, the people who made the super incomes, are the people who should accept the adjustments, not ordinary working people, and we'll be delivering that message to Government."
He highlighted the increased use of agency workers and said employers were not using these workers for benevolent reasons.
"It is a very deliberate attempt to exploit those people, to undermine the pay and conditions of workers in this country and they are being used specifically to batter down and keep down wages and to undermine what we've achieved."
Siptu's head of research, Manus O'Riordan, told the meeting that real pay and living standards were basically frozen when inflation and mortgage payments were taken into account. "Higher inflation has wiped out any real wage gains," he said, while average pay had fallen by 1.2 per cent in the 27 months of Towards 2016.
The meeting also heard a call for the scrapping of benchmarking by shop steward Kieran Allen. He said workers must enter into new partnership talks but must do so "with a very very different spirit".
Mr Allen said the recession was caused by financial speculators "who've gone around the world, treated the world like a global casino. They're now bringing the world economy down to its knees."
Workers would not "carry the can" for them, and he warned that incoming taoiseach Brian Cowen "is not going to bully the trade union movement". Workers were not responsible for higher interest rates, higher fuel and food prices, he said.
Michelle Monaghan from the health professionals branch said the partnership talks were "the only game in town" and it would be a "disaster" to negotiate pay increases individually.
Paul Hansard from the Dublin construction branch said conditions on construction sites were now "actually worse than they were before the agreement came into play". Large firms were removing direct employees and workers were being let go if they queried any practices, he said.
