The revised Croke Park II proposals do not just represent a “tweaking” of the deal rejected last month. Neither are they a whole new blueprint for reducing the State’s paybill drawn up on a blank sheet of paper.
While key Government objectives such as cutting pay for high earners, changes in the payment of increments and an increase in the working week for many workers remain, the revised document is in many key ways a different animal from the one overwhelmingly shot down by union members in April.
In the interim the Government has made a number of significant concessions or "clarifications", depending on your point of view, which are likely to make the proposals more palatable this time.
Two tranches
While those earning between €65,000 and €100,000 will still face pay cuts of at least 5.5 per cent, there is more certainty in the revised proposals that staff will see their original pay rates restored in two tranches within five years. Increments for such personnel, which were to have been frozen, will now be paid, albeit after pauses of six months.
Another key group of workers that opposed the Croke Park II proposals were frontline staff such as nurses and gardaí who objected to cuts to their premium rates for Sunday working.
The Sunday premium rates will now remain intact, although nurses will have to work a longer week of 39 hours.
Teachers also received concessions in that a significant proportion of the supervision and substitution payments, which are to go under the deal, will be restored in two tranches in 2017 and 2018. Lower-paid civil servants who also campaigned against the Croke Park II deal have also secured changes to proposed alterations to flexitime working, the provision of overtime and redeployment arrangements.
The key questions for the Government now are how much the revised Croke Park II proposals will generate in savings and whether they will be accepted by union members in forthcoming ballots.
The Government appeared to wobble last weekend when Minister of State Brian Hayes suggested it could receive less in savings than the €300 million this year which had been its bottom line.
Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin said he was confident the €300 million target would be met. However, we will probably have to take his word for it for the present. There are no costings published as yet on the proposed measures, although the Minister indicated these could emerge in time in answers to parliamentary questions.
Howlin was also counting no chickens with regards to whether the proposals would be accepted and was careful to point out that union ballots still have to be undertaken.
However, while there will still undoubtedly be those who are against the proposals, there does not seem to be the same groundswell of opposition as there was to the original Croke Park II deal.
It is also difficult to see the same coalition of unions emerging in a united campaign against the revised proposals.
More stable
Ironically for the Government, the revised proposals have the potential, if accepted, to be more stable than the rejected deal.
If several hundred members of Siptu had accepted the Croke Park II agreement last month and the public service committee of Ictu had pushed it through using its electoral college system of voting, the likelihood now is that there would be a significant split in the trade union movement and the Government would be facing trench warfare with nurses and other groups.
Neither development seems likely this time around.