THE GENERAL secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) has warned that if a new social partnership deal is to be secured, agreement will have to be reached within the next three weeks.
Speaking yesterday at the launch of new Ictu tax reform proposals, David Begg said that he did not envisage negotiations between unions, employers and the Government continuing into August which he said was "a dead month".
"If you leave something like this and try to pick it up again later, I think it will just drift away from us for a start," he said.
Mr Begg said there was also a more practical problem in that some workers were now three months into what should have been a new agreement and they had received no increases.
"I cannot hold that indefinitely. I think people will want to pursue that separately if we cannot do it in a centralised collective way," he said.
Asked about the prospects of reaching a new deal, Mr Begg said: "At one level that atmosphere is extremely pessimistic, but the nature of this process is quite unique because if the negotiations went on for six years, the deal would only be done in the last week.
"Part of the reason for that is you have a tripartite agreement with Government, employers and ourselves. If there was no Government, the employers and ourselves would probably be negotiating in the traditional give-and-take way, but the Government is a part of it and the Government has a hand to play. But Government cannot really play that hand too early from its point of view because the Government cannot put out proposals and take them back. So the Government will only play its hand of cards when it knows that there is a deal actually in prospect," he said.
Mr Begg said the pace of the negotiations on a new agreement had picked up and the process was now more intensive.
Government officials are to hold bilateral talks with unions and employers today and tomorrow. In addition to pay, unions and employers are also divided on issues such as collective bargaining rights.
Ictu urged the Government to close down tax shelters, clamp down on tax exiles by reducing the length of time they can spend in the country, and reintroduce a bank levy.
Ictu said the Government should cap at €640,000 the amount paid to top executives that companies can set against their tax. It also said that there was a case to be made for increasing income tax for the very wealthy. Mr Begg said that taxation policy should be grounded in the concept of equity and he called for income from all sources to be taxed in the same way.
