Hundreds of retired ESB workers protest at company headquarters

Hundreds of retired ESB workers marched on the company’s Dublin headquarters on Tuesday demanding pension increases they say were stripped from them unfairly almost 10 years ago.

They are just one strand of thousands of former semi-State employees who feel cast aside by changes to their pension schemes.

Those affected say they are struggling, trapped between the realities of a frozen income and the rising cost of living, and with nobody to fight their corner.

“It’s very simple, [it is] 10 years and we got nothing,” said one worker who asked only to be identified as Jim. “You have to watch the shillings. The bills are coming in and they are going up all the time.”

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The ESB Retired Staff Association, which organised the march, explained how its members became trapped by the terms of a 2010 pension agreement negotiated between management and unions without their input, and that essentially imposed an ongoing freeze in payment increases.

‘Rejected’ claim

A claim it submitted last year for a 7.7 per cent increase – reflecting what they say existing staff have received between 2015 and 2017 – was “rejected” by the ESB and the pension fund, it said.

There is a general sense among workers that they have no outlet to raise their concerns or options other than a prohibitively expensive legal action.

This apparent frustration was set out at an Oireachtas Committee last October during which representatives of the ESB, RTÉ and Bord na Móna retirees said they had tried, unsuccessfully, to discuss the issue with the Equality Tribunal, the ombudsman, through industrial relations procedures and with trustees of funds.

On Tuesday, demonstrators from around the country wore yellow high-vis vests outside the company’s East Wall headquarters as a handful of employees looked on. The ESB said the pension scheme “is managed and operated independently” and declined to comment.

Its trustees, who the retired workers say have flatly refused to engage, could not be reached for comment. The ESB group of unions, who the workers say negotiated the 2010 agreement, said nobody was available for comment.

‘Going nowhere’

However, it is this sense of firmly shut doors that is fuelling the workers’ determination to protest, particularly in the run up to a general election.

“I have a message for them here today: we are going nowhere,” Tom O’Brien, from Tralee, Co Kerry, who retired in 2013, told the crowd through a PA system. “Our voices are only going to get louder and louder and louder.”

He told them that each person who turned up – organisers put the figure at 500 – represented five who could not.

Marcella Doyle, who retired 15 years ago, said she has spent the majority of that time on a fixed income with rising living costs, including a 160 per cent bump in health insurance.

“As far as I am concerned, the ESB don’t know we are here. We don’t exist,” she shrugged.

A woman called Dorry from Co Wexford explained how her late husband who retired almost a quarter of a century ago had worked as an on-call engineer fixing electrical faults as people phoned their house with pleas for assistance. Dorry continued to answer the phone when he went out.

“For the first 15 years of our marriage we didn’t have a Christmas dinner on Christmas day because my husband was out working,” she said, adding that today she is “fighting to live”.