THE IRISH Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) is to hold a special delegate conference on November 17th to consider whether to accept the new national pay deal negotiated earlier this month.
At a meeting on Saturday the executive of Ictu considered a final draft of the agreement but did not make any recommendation on it.
A spokesman said that the meeting largely centred on the logistics of arranging the special delegate conference to consider the deal.
Over the coming weeks most individual unions will hold special meetings and ballots of members to decide their stances on how they should vote on the deal at the Ictu delegate conference in November.
Under the proposed agreement workers would receive increases of six per cent phased over a 21-month period. Low-paid staff would receive an additional 0.5 per cent rise. However, in the private sector there would be a three-month pay pause, while this would run for 11 months for those in the public service.
On Friday the executive of the Unite trade union recommended that its members should reject the deal.
However, the executive of the largest public sector union Impact recommended acceptance of the agreement to its members.
The regional secretary of Unite Jimmy Kelly told The Irish Timesat the weekend that its executive had rejected the agreement as it had not delivered on many of the "deal-breaker" issues which the union had put forward prior to the recent negotiations with employers and the Government.
He said that deal would effectively represent a pay cut for members as it would not exceed the level of inflation.
Mr Kelly said that when taking account of the lower-than-inflation rises in the last national agreement, the new deal would effectively mean that workers' earnings had been cut by about 2.5 per cent in real terms.
He said that there had been no progress made on improved pensions for workers in the new agreement and that the Government had "caved in" to the views of the employers' group Ibec on the issue of mandatory trade union recognition.
He said that when the issue of trade union recognition had been raised in advance of the Lisbon Treaty referendum the Taoiseach Brian Cowen had said that this was a matter for the pay talks.
However, Mr Kelly said that in the negotiations there had been no movement on this issue.
He said that it was "crazy" that after 20 years of social partnership employers did not have to recognise unions.
However, the general secretary of Impact Peter McLoone said that the proposed deal would help stabilise the economy and protect incomes in a difficult economic period.
He said that even though the deal involved a "special sacrifice" from public servants in the form of an 11-month pay pause, most understood the prevailing economic realities and wanted to protect services in a time of tight public finances.
The country's largest trade union Siptu is to hold a special conference on the deal in the middle of next month before conducting a ballot of members.
