PUBLIC SECTOR unions have been warned by Labour leader Eamon Gilmore that strikes against the Government’s decision to impose pension levies on State employees could backfire.
Speaking to Impact union members in Castlebar, Co Mayo, he said: “To defend yourselves now as employees, to defend the services you deliver to the public – you now need allies and friends among the general public. You need to reverse some of the unfair and unjustified public perceptions of the public service.
“This, therefore, is not a time for industrial relations tactics which may have worked for you in the past but which now will only further alienate a wider public who are worried about the security of their own jobs and businesses.”
Mr Gilmore said there has been “an orgy of scapegoating” against public sector workers in recent months “which has enabled the Government to make the kind of unilateral decisions which were announced last week”.
“Setting worker against worker is an old stratagem used by establishments down the generations, and I find it as unacceptable now as I would have when Catholic and Protestant workers were set against each other in Belfast in the 1920s.
“But it seems to me that to some extent it is working. Public servants have taken a hammering in sections of the press for months and are, as a result, now having to take a hammering in their net income.”
The Government should agree a three-year deal with the social partners covering jobs, pay, tax and public services.
Defending State-supplied services, he said public servants now needed to “explain what you do”.
“To win over the customer and the client. To show that you want to pull together to get us all out of this economic mess. This is a time for pulling together. For working together.”
The Government’s “fixation” would not solve the economic crisis because “the more jobs that are lost, the more that will have to be cut, which in turn shrinks the economy – until we reach a point where there is nothing more that can be cut”.
Mr Gilmore said he disagreed with Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s warning to the Dublin Chamber of Commerce last Thursday when he warned that “the future might not be as good for our children as it has been for us”.
“That is defeatist talk. The future can be better for our children – but better, not measured in material things and consumer goods, but by the quality of their lives, by the fairness of society and by the sustainability of both economy and ecology.”
