Over 3,000 drivers in Dublin Bus and Bus Eireann are expected to vote on new productivity deals over the next nine days which are aimed at gearing the companies to face competition.
This would leave Iarnrod Eireann as the only CIE company which has still to finalise major changes in work practices ahead of market liberalisation targets.
The Dublin Bus package would see pay for over 2,000 drivers rise by 20 per cent since March, at a cost £9.6 million a year. It emerged from a bitter six-day strike.
As part of an interim solution to the strike, basic pay for Dublin Bus drivers was raised last month from £270 a week to £302, at a cost of £4.6 million. An expert group was then set up to produce extra cost-savings of £5 million a year. This was to finance the balance of the unions' claim for a basic pay level of £330 a week.
The review group - comprising former Irish Congress of Trade Unions president, Mr Phil Flynn, industrial relations consultant, Mr Paul O'Sullivan, and Becton Dickinson managing director, Mr Liam Downey - has proposed union co-operation with the contracting out of some Dublin Bus services as the main means of saving money.
Under the new system, Dublin Bus could contract one privately owned bus for every additional bus to its own fleet.
No Dublin Bus jobs would be threatened by the contracting out of operations and the private contractors would never provide more than 20 per cent of the total fleet. The new arrangements would be used primarily to develop new routes.
Basic pay for Bus Eireann would be raised from £180 a week to £330, in return for more flexible rosters. However, the increase would include absorption of existing allowances, which give most drivers earnings of more than £250 a week now.
Both unions representing bus drivers, the National Bus and Railworkers Union and SIPTU, are expected to recommend acceptance of the proposals.
NBRU general secretary Mr Peter Bunting, who first presented a claim for £330 a week for Dublin Bus drivers last October, said he believed "the formulas are very satisfactory from everybody's point of view".
The increased ability of both companies to change and expand their business would also enhance the ability of the unions to influence discussions in the new public transport forum being set up under the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, he said.
SIPTU's national industrial secretary, Mr Noel Dowling, said: "We're convinced it's the least painful way of securing our objectives.
"It avoids further erosion of terms and conditions built up for drivers over a long number of years and it gives the company greater flexibility to respond to the needs of the travelling public in Dublin."
He said the expert group on Dublin Bus recommended significant extra Government funding to provide an enhanced pension provision for employees' dependants, and resources to develop a partnership forum in the company along the lines of the highly successful Aer Rianta model.
Full competition on bus routes is due by 2007 at the latest. No date has yet been set for train services.
The fragmentation of Iarnrod Eireann drivers into three unions has made it more difficult to achieve consensus than in CIE's bus subsidiaries.