Nurses' leaders met health service managers yesterday to discuss return-to-work arrangements if the Labour Court formula is accepted. The recommendation is due out at noon today, but the fact that both sides are already discussing the issue augurs well.
If the four unions in the Nursing Alliance - SIPTU, IMPACT, the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) - decide to recommend the terms, the first question they will have to consider is whether to order members back to work while they ballot. SIPTU and the PNA indicated earlier that they would ballot members on the picket line.
However, comments by SIPTU and PNA leaders at the weekend suggested this stance could change if the INO and IMPACT feel it would be better to ballot in the calmer atmosphere generated by a return to work.
With 23,000 members out on strike, the INO faces a logistical nightmare in trying to conduct a quick ballot on the picket lines.
Regardless of how the ballot is conducted, the leaders of the nursing unions could face their toughest test yet, if they recommend acceptance of the terms. The greatest challenge of all confronts the INO.
By far the largest union, it has been unremitting in its demands over the past two years that all of its claims be met. The fact that those claims appear to have a built-in escalator has only made their achievement all the greater.
Very few people, and least of all INO members, seem to remember that when the union first sought a review of pay its aim was to raise the maximum on the staff nurse scale to £20,500.
Today staff nurses earn over £22,000 and have seen their qualifications and location allowances increased from £328 a year to between £1,000 and £1,500. They also have new overtime rates and recognition of previous service for incremental credits.
Those gains are substantial by any standards and have seen nurses' earnings rise by 23 per cent in two years.
The aggressive strategy succeeded because it was widely recognised that nurses were coming from a low base and because of the ability of the INO leaders to educate and mobilise a previously quiescent membership.
Inevitably, the process required whipping up a strong sense of injustice. If the Labour Court recommendation is accepted by the Nursing Alliance unions, the INO leadership will see some of that emotion turned on themselves.
One of the arguments most likely to be thrown back at the union's leaders is their previous insistence that all nurses' grievances must be resolved now. That cannot happen in the real world, if only because meeting one grievance often creates another.
Again, nurses tend to forget that the Labour Court recommendation issued on August 31st was to improve differentials for ward sisters and nurse managers. These had been eroded by the 1997 Labour Court recommendation, which gave a 14.5 per cent pay rise to staff nurses.
The August award gave pay rises of between 6 and 15 per cent to higher grades, which made staff nurses angry that they had been left behind.
Their anger was understandable, given that the INO leadership had nailed its colours to the mast by demanding that the August award must contain significant benefits for staff nurses.
It even identified long-service increments, the most difficult demand for the Government to concede, as the area where concessions must be made.
Now that significant concessions to staff nurses are coming in the form of a senior staff nurse grade, the INO leadership may have to learn to say No to some of its more militant members. It should not be afraid to point out just how big the gains have been, and to claim the credit for them. Altogether these concessions have cost the Exchequer over £187 million.
The INO can argue that it has pushed nurses' claims to the limit, this side of a meltdown in either the health service or public service pay.
Of course, that all depends on the chairman of the Labour Court, Mr Finbarr Flood, succeeding in crafting a recommendation that meets at least some of the nurses' aspirations without leaving cracks through which claims from other public service workers can slip.