The next time the Government sits down with public service unions the aim will be to secure an agreement "that will see us into a new era beyond fiscal crises", the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin has said.
Addressing Siptu’s health division conference in Dublin on Thursday he said public service unions had signalled that they wanted these talks to take place in the summer of next year.
Mr Howlin said that while the journey was far from over, a sound foundation has been laid - not least through agreements such as the Croke Park and Haddington Road accords that the Government had unions had been able to negotiate.
The Minister's comments same as Siptu said it was no longer in the space of pay cuts for its members.
The union called on the Government to begin a process of pay recovery for its members and the ending of financial emergency legislation under which various pay cuts had been put in place over recent years.
Responding to the Minister, Siptu health division organiser Paul Bell, said: "It is now clearly time for workers in the health sector to begin to share in the dividend that has been created by their work in reforming the provision of patient care and their perseverance over years of cost containment".
Mr Bell welcomed the Government’s decision to end the moratorium on recruitment and to tackle the amount spent on workers employed through agencies.
He said that about €250 million would be spent by the HSE this year on agency staff “at a time when our members are being chased around hospitals for further reductions in their pay”.
Mr Howlin said that expenditure on agency staffing was “an unnecessarily expensive and inefficient way to provide necessary health services”.
“One of the key challenges facing managers in the health service is maintaining control over the pay costs in the health sector; that can only be done by reducing dependency on agency workers.”
Last week about 2,000 healthcare staff such as porters, catering and household staff voted to take strike action if management moved to alter existing weekend working arrangements which attracted premium payments.
Mr Howlin said the Government would seek to ensure that mechanisms set out in the Haddington Road agreement were used properly by all sides in any dispute.
Mr Bell said the financial emergency was now over and that this must involve ending the legislation which provided “unacceptable powers to Government ministers to unilaterally vary terms and conditions of employment”.
He said his members now had an expectation that a reform dividend referred to by the Government “will mark the beginning of the process of returning to them the earnings that they have lost in recent years”.
