Workers were urged yesterday to reject the new social partnership agreement by trade unionists campaigning against the deal.
They claimed Sustaining Progress contained effective wage cuts and would "shackle" trade unions with new restrictions.
A number of members of SIPTU, the Irish Nurses' Organisation, the Teachers' Union of Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union and the National Bus and Rail Union attended a press conference in Dublin to express opposition to the deal.
Mr Eddie Conlon, a member of the TUI executive, claimed the agreement was the most regressive since the partnership process began in 1987.
"It very much reflects the employers' agenda going into the talks," he said.
"The wage increases are insufficient. They won't even match inflation and are de facto pay cuts."
The agreement proposes a 7 per cent pay increase in phases over 18 months. It also includes a timetable for payment of the benchmarking pay increases, averaging 8.9 per cent, to public servants.
Mr Conlon criticised proposals in the deal requiring unions and employers to refer disputes to the Labour Court or other independent bodies for binding arbitration. The agreement had also failed to deliver a statutory right to union recognition.
For public servants, he said, the claim by the ICTU president, Senator Joe O'Toole, that benchmarking was akin to an ATM machine, had proved to be untrue. "We're calling on the widest possible 'No' vote and we're calling on unions who are against this deal to co-operate as broadly as possible," Mr Conlon said.
Ms Jo Tully, an INO shop steward at St James's Hospital in Dublin, said benchmarking had been "an absolute disaster" for nurses.
It had widened the pay gap between staff nurses and the next grade of healthcare professional, she said. "We're being sold a dead duck as far as the pay arrangements are concerned and we're being asked to give increased productivity in return." Mr Kieran Allen of SIPTU's education branch criticised his union's executive for recommending the agreement.
He claimed half of the speakers at the union's consultative conference last week had spoken against the deal, yet the "whole apparatus" of the union would be used to try to secure a "Yes" vote.
Mr Terry Kelleher, a member of the CPSU executive, accused the ICTU of "developing into a sophisticated dictatorship of which Saddam Hussein would be proud". Congress, he claimed, had bullied unions into accepting benchmarking "as the only show in town". Asked if they had ever supported a partnership agreement in the past, all six speakers at the press conference said they had not.
However one, Mr Mike Martin of SIPTU, said he had no ideological objection to social partnership.
He had been opposed to each agreement on its individual merits, "but this one is by far the worst".
Unions are currently balloting members on the agreement, with the final outcome to become known at an ICTU special delegate conference on March 26th.
