MEETINGS OF the executive committees of Siptu and the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) today may prove crucial to the future of the agreement on public service pay and reform.
Already the executives of six unions and representative bodies have decided to recommend rejection of the deal negotiated a fortnight ago.
The executives of three public service unions are proposing acceptance of the agreement, which involves guarantees of no further pay cuts until at least 2014, no compulsory redundancies and a mechanism for potentially restoring original pay rates in return for widespread work practice reforms.
Siptu is the country’s largest union and its stance on the deal will be crucial if it is to be adopted. However, it may defer a decision until a further meeting next week, its president, Jack O’Connor, indicated last night.
Union sources have said that even if Siptu backs the deal, there is likely to be insufficient support for it across the Public Services Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions if the INMO, which has over 40,000 members, rejects the proposed agreement.
Yesterday the executives of the CPSU, which represents lower-paid civil servants, and PDforra, the representative body for personnel in the Defence Forces, became the latest to recommend rejection of the deal to members.
Blair Horan, the general secretary of the CPSU, said that it was beginning to look as if the deal overall may be rejected, based on the recommendations that have emerged to date, although he said that this was not certain. He also contended that if the deal was rejected by public service staff that it was capable of being renegotiated.
However, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said yesterday that the Government had not contemplated any public sector pay arrangements other than the deal formulated at Croke Park a fortnight ago.
Sources said last night that there were no plans for unions and Government officials to reconvene talks to provide clarifications on the deal.
Other Ministers said yesterday that public service staff should ask themselves what was the alternative to the current deal.
Meanwhile the trade union Impact has told the Health Service Executive that it will be reinstating its ban on answering phones in various parts of the health service on a rolling basis from tomorrow.
The phone ban, which forms part of the union’s industrial action over pay cuts, will run from 9am to 1pm in HSE West tomorrow and HSE South on Thursday. It will come into effect in HSE Dublin/Mid Leinster on Friday.
Impact national secretary Kevin Callinan said last night that the ban had been lifted for the Easter period and that it was just being reinstated. He said that nothing more should be read into the move.