ALL OPTIONS will be considered when a strategy is being devised to try and get the Government to rethink its plans for a pension levy on public sector workers, the Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) said yesterday.
Liam Doran, INO general secretary, said the levy was an unfair tax on public sector workers, and unions would band together to fight it.
“All options will be put on the table in terms of how we respond to this collectively across the entire public service,” he said.
Asked if this would include strike action, he said: “Nobody wants industrial action. You are talking to a union that’s been down that road in recent times and nobody wants it.”
The strategy he was referring to will be devised at meetings of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions today and tomorrow. The INO, which has 40,000 members, will back whatever strategy is agreed.
Mr Doran, who was speaking at a press conference in Dublin following a three-hour meeting of the executive council of the INO, urged his members to mobilise immediately and email TDs and Senators and attend their clinics next Saturday to point out to them that the levy is a regressive tax on public sector workers and that plans for it must be re-examined.
The proposed levy is far too severe on public servants with low or moderate incomes, he said.
He noted the Government was trying to get €4.3 billion of the €6 billion in savings it wanted to secure this year and next year by imposing this “onerous tax” on 320,000 citizens and withholding pay increases from them when their only crime was to work in the public sector.
“That is unfair, unjust and indefensible in the view of the INO, and we will mobilise with our trade union colleagues across the public sector to have the Government think again and secure a more favourable and equitable outcome.”
It was unfair, he said, when the Government was failing to ensure other sectors of Irish society, including bankers, builders, and speculators, were not being asked to contribute their fair share to the country’s economic recovery.
Meanwhile, he said, the Government was failing to tackle a wide range of tax shelters and loopholes, costing the public exchequer hundreds of millions of euro a year which were still being availed of by the well-off.
He said there was no public sector worker who was oblivious to the economic difficulties facing the country.
“There is no public sector worker who will belittle the importance of having a job at this time, but equally there is no public sector worker who would accept that they are the only section of Irish society that has to make a discernible contribution to stabilising the economic difficulties of this country.
“And when public servants see others paying their fair share then I think Government can come with greater legitimacy to all public servants and say ‘look, we have a problem, it has to be solved, we’re making other sectors of society play their part, now we are asking you to do likewise’, but that has not happened.”
The INO also wants workers in profitable employment to be able to continue to avail of the terms of the current social partnership agreement.