Two one-day work stoppages by drivers at bus company Go-Ahead scheduled for the start of March have been suspended after the union involved received clarification that the company will attend a Labour Court hearing into the dispute, over pay.
About 300 Siptu members at the company had been seeking a pay rise to address the recent rise in inflation, while the company had been seeking to have the issue dealt with in conjunction with a number of other claims.
The union complained that no pay offer had been made to drivers despite the company reaching agreement with its staff on the issue in the UK.
In late December, the drivers voted by a large majority to take industrial action and two 24-hour strikes were scheduled for March 1st and 8th. The move would have affected passengers on a number of local Dublin and regional services formerly operated by Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann respectively.
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In a statement issued by Siptu on Monday, its sector organiser John Murphy said “an overwhelming majority [of the union’s members at Go_Ahead] voted for industrial action if management continued to refuse to engage on the issue of pay. Following this vote, management did agree to attend talks at the Workplace Relations Commission. However, at these talks it refused to engage on the pay issue separately to other matters. We then referred the dispute to the Labour Court, which the company had initially refused to attend.
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“The company has now agreed to attend the Labour Court and our members, in response, have suspended their scheduled industrial action,” he said.
