ONE OF the State’s leading public service trade union leaders has said that the alternative to the proposed public service pay and reform deal agreed with the Government this week is a prolonged industrial relations war.
Tom Geraghty, general secretary of the Public Service Executive Union (PSEU) and secretary to the Public Services Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, said that while a number of unions had already supported the proposed agreement, he was not surprised there was considerable opposition to it.
However, he said that he had to explain to public service staff that the alternative was worse.
Mr Geraghty said that the proposed agreement provided for no compulsory redundancies in the public service, no further pay cuts and reviews of pay next year and in subsequent years.
He said that the deal allowed an opportunity for union input into the Government’s stated intention to reduce pensions for staff.
“We would have preferred, obviously, if we would have been able to secure from the Government a commitment to address the smash and grab on members’ pay. It is simply not going to be possible to do any of that by negotiation.
“We would have preferred if we could have got firm commitments from the Government to begin restoring the cuts that were imposed . . . It is our judgment that it will not be possible to get those sorts of commitments through a negotiating process . . . We have brought the negotiations as far as we possible can. The only alternative . . . is to engage in a prolonged . . . industrial relations war.
“I do not believe that the vast bulk of public servants want to find themselves in that situation and even if they did it is not going to change the external factors that are influencing the situation in which we find ourselves.
“It is not going to change the difficulties in our economy or the fiscal difficulties that the Government has,” he told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland.
Since the proposed deal was reached in talks between Government officials and unions in Croke Park earlier this week, the executives of two unions, the Irish National Teachers Organisation and the PSEU, have backed the agreement while two others, the Teachers Union of Ireland and the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland, opposed it.
The Civil Public and Services Union has deferred a decision until April 12th but its general secretary has warned that if a vote had been taken at a meeting of its executive earlier this week it would have rejected the deal.
Mr Geraghty said that each of the unions would make a decision on the proposed agreement but that the precedent was that ultimately a decision would be made by majority vote at the public services committee, taking account of the size of the different organisations.
Siptu, the Republic’s largest union, is not expected to finalise a ballot of its public service members until late May or early June.
In a circular to PSEU branches sent on Thursday, Mr Geraghty said: “Negotiations produce compromises. An outcome that protects pay, creates opportunities for pay adjustments, protects jobs and allows input into the protection of pensions is, quite simply, better than any realistic alternative.”
