Public service demands mount for new Minister Paschal Donohoe

Last Friday a delegation of senior public service trade union leaders met Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Paschal Donohoe, with pay for the country's 300,000 State employees very much on the agenda.

The message was clear: although the Lansdowne Road agreement, which only came into effect in January, was supposed to have set public service pay policy until autumn 2018, if economic growth continued on its current trends, all bets were off and public servants would want to see a share of this reflected in their paypackets.

While this was the first meeting between Donohoe and union leaders since his appointment, their views would have come as no surprise either to him or his officials.

At various conferences around the country in recent weeks, trade unions had publicly signalled that proclamations by ministers during the election campaign about surging economic growth and the end of the financial emergency had changed the dynamic.

Expectations were now also growing fast. The 18 per cent pay award recommended for Luas staff – which was rejected – did not go unnoticed elsewhere.

The view in the unions was that just as the absence of economic growth had forced them to swallow painful cuts to terms and conditions in the Haddington Road deal in 2013, higher-than-anticipated growth levels now should lead to an acceleration of the pace of pay restoration in the public service.

The Government, for its part, has a number of issues to deal with. While the Lansdowne Road agreement sits at the heart of its public pay policy, organisations representing tens of thousands of teachers and gardaí never accepted it. A way has to be found to try to bring them into the tent in the very near future.

Legislation put in place last October sets out severe financial penalties for members of organisations considered to have repudiated agreements such as Lansdowne Road.

Additional hours

That is why a vote in the coming days by members of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI) on whether to cease carrying out 33 additional hours work per year, introduced under the Croke

Park

deal of 2010, is hugely important.

If the teachers opt out of the additional Croke Park hours, they will be considered by the Government to have repudiated a national agreement and will face the non-payment of increments from July. Furthermore, the planned restoration of money for supervision and substitution duties from September will also be very much in doubt. Such actions would undoubtedly lead to industrial action in schools in the autumn.

There is also potential for unrest among gardaí in the months ahead, although a Garda pay review process which is nearing completion will be watched carefully.

A fortnight ago, outgoing Labour ministers Brendan Howlin and Alan Kelly agreed in principle a deal with firefighters which would see, in essence, the reversal of rent allowance payments of about €4,000 a year for those taken on after 2012 in return for productivity and agreement to work within the Lansdowne Road framework.

It was hoped by the government at the time that this would offer a pathway to the teacher and Garda bodies to get back on to the Lansdowne Road train while addressing the hugely contentious issue of two -tier pay structures for new entrants.

The recent Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil agreement also contained provision for the establishment of a new public service pay commission.

The Lansdowne Road accord says there will have to be talks on establishing a new mechanism for determining public service pay as the economy moves back to normality.

Benchmarking process

The Government does not want to return to a previous system of leapfrogging pay claims by different public service groups. However, the benchmarking process of the

Bertie Ahern

years is politically toxic for senior figures in

Fine Gael

who strongly condemned it while in opposition.

It is understood the new pay commission will make recommendations to the Government, but these will not be binding. The Government will still be free to negotiate with unions and sources say the commission will “inform” this process.

One highly placed union figure last week told The Irish Times he believed it could act as a "midwife" for some new form of pay arrangement.

The unions, for their part, would prefer to have some form of process that involved collective bargaining on pay with public service management rather than new rates imposed by panels of experts.

Another key issue for any commission examining pay will be its terms of reference and whether it will assess remuneration in Ireland in comparison with that of public service staff abroad.

Pay demands

Some public service groups – such as nurses – are also seeking special pay reviews on the grounds that their traditional roles have evolved considerably in recent years. Others, such as doctors, are seeking renegotiations of their contracts which would also trigger significant pay demands.

However, if “uniqueness” is accepted as the basis for specific ringfenced additional pay awards, then all groups in the public service will fine-tune arguments as to why they are “special”.

The Government will also have to find a way of tackling genuine staff shortages in some parts of the public service – which, more than likely, will have to involve more money being offered – without upsetting the entire apple cart, leading to knock-on claims from elsewhere in the public service.