Talks about a new public sector pay deal were adjourned on Sunday after a couple of hours despite the Government having tabled what Simon Harris described as “a substantially revised and improved offer” to the unions.
The Tánaiste suggested the new offer should provide a basis for progress, but sources on the union side suggested it still falls short of what they believe is required to reach a wider agreement.
The two sides will engage again with the Government-appointed steering group led by Workplace Relations Commission chair Kevin Foley on Monday.
The union’s position has been characterised as “pessimistic”, however, with regard to the prospects of reaching a deal as things stand. There had been some suggestion Foley might declare the gap between the two sides too great to continue with his group’s efforts to restart the talks process proper.
RM Block
Speaking on RTÉ’s The Week in Politics, Harris sounded confident the Government’s revised offer represented a substantial improvement on the 6.75 per cent plus 1 per cent for local bargaining rejected by the union side nine days ago.
“We, the Government, have made a substantially revised and improved offer,” he said.
“I would really ask now on the basis of that, everybody works in the hours ahead towards resolution and de-escalation. We’ve got to move this forward.”
Nobody wanted to see “further disruption”, he said, in reference to Thursday’s planned one-day stoppage by union members in the public and Civil Service. The Government, he said, wanted to improve the pay of its employees, but “we need to have something that’s sustainable here”.
Harris said he was “confident” that two high-profile political meetings in Dublin centred on Ireland’s presidency of the council of the European Union could go ahead this week.
Asked for his view on the state of negotiations, Kevin Callinan, who leads the union side, said: “Out of respect to the process, which is ongoing, I am not going to comment beyond saying that it is very difficult.”
In the absence of a breakthrough over the next couple of days, the 24-hour strike looks likely to proceed, with schools set to close again and substantial disruption caused to health, local government, social protection and other services.
Callinan, whose union Fórsa has the highest number of members involved in the dispute, has suggested any deal would need to be bigger, in pay increase terms, than the deal struck 2½ years ago which was worth a total of 9¼ per cent plus 1 per cent for local bargaining over the same 30-month period envisaged for the new agreement.
The unions had expected local bargaining to deliver 2 per cent in any new deal as they felt this had been committed to in the last agreement.
Implementing local bargaining has been a big sticking point between the Department of Public Expenditure and unions, however. Some unions were told recently it could be simply applied as a universal pay increase rather than being targeted to address specific sectoral issues as originally intended – a system that often means not all staff in a particular work area benefit.
