A strike at Irish Ferries is set to enter its second week after talks at the Labour Relations Commission ended yesterday without agreement.
The strike by ships officers has caused the cancellation of all the company's services since last Monday, and there was pessimism last night about the prospects of a resolution.
Organisations representing hoteliers and exporters issued a joint statement warning that a prolonged dispute could cause serious economic damage.
The strike, organised by SIPTU, is in response to the company's plan to outsource employment on its service between Rosslare and France next year.
In the talks at the LRC, which began on Thursday, alternative cost-cutting proposals were presented by the union. The company, however, said these came nowhere near the savings it will generate through its outsourcing plan.
Mr Alf McGrath, director of human resources, said the SIPTU proposals would, at face value, save the company €2.47 million a year.
Management, however, believed the union had not made provision for sufficient staff numbers, so the actual saving would have been €2.1 million.
This compared with savings of between €5 million and €6 million which the company could generate through sourcing its crew through a third-party agency.
This comprised labour cost savings of between €3.6 million and €4.4 million, as well as reductions of €1 million in the cost of technical expertise and €400,000 in on-shore management.
The company's stance was dismissed as "nonsense" by SIPTU official Mr Paul Smyth.
He said the union's proposals would also have resulted in reduced management costs, in addition to the on-board savings of €2.5 million.
He claimed the union had "flushed out" management's real intention, which was to introduce outsourcing and then extend it to its Irish Sea services.
"This is a race to the bottom. It benchmarks the cost of Irish seafarers against that of Latvians and Poles and says 'you haven't come up to the mark'. Well, we won't play that game."
Mr McGrath said he commended SIPTU for "making the effort" in identifying savings. "But this is a commercial enterprise, it is not a semi-State or something that is being subsidised."
Both men said they could not see how the dispute might be resolved, and no further talks were planned last night.
In a joint statement, the Irish Hotels Federation and the Irish Exporters' Association said SIPTU's "unjustifiable action" was jeopardising essential services and placing jobs under threat.
