Donohoe to signal to unions Haddington Road hours must stay

Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe will Thursday signal to public sector unions that the extra hours they work under the Haddington Road agreement will not be eliminated.

The comment will set the Minister on a collision course with nurses and teachers and other public servants who are seeking to have the hours set aside.

Public sector unions agreed to work extra unpaid hours during the financial crisis as part of an agreement to mitigate threatened pay cuts above those they had already suffered. Many are now seeking to no longer work these hours as part of the process of reversing the emergency measures implemented during the economic crash.

However, in a speech to be delivered Thursday morning to a Industrial Relations News conference in Dublin, Mr Donohoe will specifically signal the need to maintain the Haddington Road hours and other productivity measures.

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"These savings and reforms have allowed us to legitimately say that we were 'doing more with less'," Mr Donohoe will tell delegates according to a draft of his speech seen by The Irish Times.

“They have also contributed in no small measure to ensuring that the normal pay increase expectations on the part of public servants and their representatives can be realised both now and into the future.”

Service areas

Of the extra hours, Mr Donohoe will say: “The additional hours secured under the Haddington Road agreement remain critical to enabling us to meet increased demand in frontline service areas and to improve services to the public generally.”

In setting the extra hours and productivity measures against the prospect of pay increases for public servants, Mr Donohoe is setting a marker for pay talks that are expected to begin in the summer.

He will say that more reform, rather than a rowing back of existing reforms, will be needed to free up resources for any public sector pay increases.

“Reform is also about improving the work environment for public servants through initiatives aimed at improving our approach to learning and development, and facilitating opportunities for greater mobility. You may think the urgency has passed in relation to that but let me assure you it hasn’t,” he will say.

“Because the only way we can respond to both the increased demands on our public services and the expectations of public servants to see their pay start to grow again – within the limited room for manoeuvre we have on the public finances – is to look again at how we can further improve on productivity and efficiency gains in the public service.”

Pay rates

That process will commence once the Public Sector Pay Commission, which is currently examining relative pay rates, pensions and working conditions in the public and private sectors, issues its report in the coming months.

As the economy improves, pressure for pay increases is growing in the public sector, with industrial unrest bubbling in several areas.

Mr Donohoe will tell delegates at the conference that he expects the discussions to be “arguably one of the most challenging...It will not be easy to secure an agreement in such circumstances.”