The current challenging economic and fiscal situation does not mean there cannot be pay rises for State employees over the life of any new agreement with the Government, the largest public service union has indicated.
Fórsa said on Thursday that a "realistic and acceptable approach to a new public service agreement does not mean ruling out pay improvements over the lifetime of a deal".
The current public service pay deal for over 340,000 public service personnel will expire at the end of December and Government and unions have been engaged in exploratory talks for some months on the potential for reaching a new accord.
Informed sources have said that this process is nearing a conclusion and a decision on whether a new agreement is possible could be made as early as next week.
Fórsa re-stated its position that in the absence of any new agreement, it was prepared to formulate and pursue claims on behalf of different grades and groups in the public service.
Addressing Fórsa's virtual national conference, the union's general secretary Kevin Callinan said any successor to the current public service pay deal would have to be realistic in the context of an extremely challenging economic and fiscal situation.
However, he said this didn’t mean ruling out pay improvements over the lifetime of a deal.
“All the economic projections point to a rapid economic and fiscal bounce-back once the Covid situation stabilises, and we have cause to hope that will start to happen in the coming months,” he said.
Mr Callinan also said he wanted to make it “crystal clear” that rolling back the additional unpaid hours that were introduced for public service staff in 2013 would have to be “an essential element of any new agreement” involving his union.
Mr Callinan said he had hoped to come to conference on Thursday “with news of substantial progress in the exploratory talks that have been taking place”.
“But I am only in a position to report that, over the last 10 days or so, these engagements have intensified significantly.”
However, he said it was still not possible to say with confidence whether Fórsa and other unions would be in a position to put a new public service agreement out to ballot in the near future.
The Department of Public Expenditure had signalled to representative bodies in recent months that it wanted a pay pause – potentially for the first year of a 24-month deal – to form part of any accord, although unions stress they have not agreed to any such measures.
The Department of Public Expenditure did not comment on the public service pay issue on Thursday.
Mr Callinan said the talks between the department and senior public service union leaders had covered a number of areas including additional working hours without extra pay introduced as part of the 2013 Haddington Road accord as well as the potential shape of a sectoral bargaining element in any new deal. He said there had also been talks on dispute resolution and service stability issues as well as modernisation and flexibility.
Mr Callinan said he had told Government negotiators that “discussions of flexibility in the public service can and must take a different course than in previous years”.
He said State employees had shown flexibility, hard work and agility in the provision of public services over recent months.
He said in the health service staff had operated in the heat of the pandemic and often at extreme personal risk to deliver a range of health workers
“In social protection, Revenue, and other Civil Service departments hundreds of thousands of new income and business supports were implemented and delivered virtually overnight. In schools, a difficult and potentially dangerous September return to classrooms was managed and delivered with a determination to overcome the obstacles.”
Mr Callinan said the prospect of entering 2021 without a public service agreement in place represented “a huge challenge for the Government and those who depend on the stability, sustainability and quality of public services”.
“History has taught us that the absence of a public service agreement means uncertainty at best, and chaos at worst. Fórsa doesn’t want to focus on difficulties and disputes. Instead, we want to continue to step up to the challenges in front of the public service in these extraordinary times.”
“Our ambition is to maintain the momentum we’ve achieved in 2020, and to sustain and acknowledge this spirit of community and commitment to delivery - a spirit that has cast our public services in a new and positive light – and apply it to the big challenges ahead,” he said.
Separately at its conference Fórsa also called for pilot projects in public and private sector organisations to explore the feasibility of introducing a four-day week without loss of pay or productivity.
A motion proposed by the union’s national executive called for working time and working patterns to be fundamentally reviewed and reformed “in light of the experience of the Covid-19 crisis, and in response to the impact of new and developing technologies, the climate crisis, increasing caring demands, and demographic shifts including longer life expectancy”.
