The privatisation of bus routes and the worsened terms and conditions of bus workers that would result will not be tolerated and will be fought all the way up to and including industrial action, National Bus and Rail Union (NBRU) general secretary, Dermot O’Leary has warned.
Mr O’Leary told the Biennial NBRU Conference in Cork this week that the union was completely opposed to the privatisation of bus routes as happened in 2015 when the National Transport Authority put 10pc of Bus Eireann and Dublin Bus routes up for auction.
“We have previously witnessed the plundering of 10% of both Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann publicly owned routes back in 2015 when the NTA decided to use the myth that EU Law obligated them to tender - or we call as it is, privatise - out our bus services,” he said.
“Delegates will recall that this trade union took a position back then which could ultimately be described as one of ‘our members were going nowhere’: they were not going to be – literally - thrown under the proverbial bus.”
Mr O’Leary said that while others might have been prepared to look at semi-state bus workers transferring under the EU Transfer of Undertaking, or TUPE to private operators, the NBRU was not, as it feared a deterioration or diminution of worker’s terms and conditions of employment.
“Quite apart from the fact that we felt we were morally obliged to protect our members, we strongly believed that exposing our members to a regime that had workers Terms and Conditions very much at the bottom of their list of priorities was simply not an option,” he said.
Mr O’Leary said that the NBRU made this assessment in 2015 on foot of an engagement with transport unions in the UK who had been exposed to the “vagaries of the privateer treatment” for many years after the Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher deregulated the UK bus market.
“The subsequent introduction of privatisation via a tendering process in London led to a regime that cast workers as a disposable commodity, to be traded every time a tendering process occurred,” he told the 70 or so delegates attending the conference at the Maryborough Park Hotel in Cork.
“One of the issues that became obvious to the NBRU back in 2013/14 was the fact that Transfer of Undertaking (TUPE) did not cover or protect pension entitlements. It still does not cover or protect pensions.”
Mr O’Leary said that as a component of the 2015 Labour Relations Commission Terms of Settlement, the NBRU received a commitment that the issue of pensions would be addressed in any future scenario where routes would come up for tender.
“This commitment was also supposed to cover any volunteers that chose to transfer to the Private Operator that was awarded the Tender for the 10% of Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann Routes. Suffice to say, those commitments, those promises, were never kept.”
Mr O’Leary said that the reality of privatisation via tendering was those private operators competing for tenders with Bus Eireann and Dublin Bus were doing so on the basis of paying their staff considerably less than those represented by the NBRU in both semi-state companies.
“We had the Taoiseach with us yesterday, I will not put words in his mouth, but his reference to the role of semi-states, the praise he has for frontline services, is not accidental, or opportunistic, but is born from his own upbringing, his own father being a bus driver in CIE and latterly Bus Eireann.
“Remember, it was a bus driver’s wages that was responsible for our Taoiseach - like thousands of others - for being able to get a college education. The wages on offer from Private Operators would not come even close to accessing such an education.”
“I have a message for the NTA and others that think that our members jobs, their ability to provide for themselves and their families is a commodity that can be traded. We, in the NBRU, will resist the diminution of terms and conditions of our members and their colleagues at the altar of an ideology.
“This race to the bottom attack on semi-state publicly-owned companies will not be tolerated …. and we will use all of our resources to stop the plundering of terms and conditions of our members, this may include industrial action if deemed necessary,” he added.
