SENIOR managers in the public service have been awarding themselves increases worth more than double those conceded to clerical civil servants under national agreements, according to the deputy general secretary of the Civil and Public Service Union.
Mr Blair Horan told delegates at the union's annual conference that in the last 10 years, top civil servants and high income groups had received pay rises of between 83 per cent and 108 per cent, yet CPSU members had received increases of about 40 per cent.
The huge increases for high income earners were fuelling the surge in Dublin house prices, he said. Ten years ago, a clerical civil servant could buy a house in Dublin for three times the annual salary. Today, a house would cost five times the annual salary. "It would be easy but facile to suggest that this problem results from partnership and centralised pay bargaining and it could, somehow, be resolved by a return to more traditional methods," he said.
The "plain fact is that globalisation, competition and the approach of EMU imposed disciplines on all of us that we can no longer escape from, unlike the 1970s and 1980s. The central challenge is to ensure that the fruits of these gains are shared more fairly across our society.
"I want to send out a very clear and firm signal to management and Government here today. Partnership 2000 and the Strategic Management Initiative cannot be about delivering the management agenda for change, with little or no cost, while staff continue to be marginalised."
On the disabled, Mr Horan said the recent Supreme Court decision that employers should not have to provide for the needs of the disabled had been a shock to trade unions. The Supreme Court was exhibiting an outmoded attitude by refusing to accept that the disabled had a right to integration and full participation in society.
He called on "all political parties to commit themselves to take immediate steps to amend the Constitution to provide recognition for these fundamental rights for disabled people".
A recent survey by the Department of Finance found that 80 per cent of disabled civil servants never received a promotion. The Department has agreed to monitor the situation and the CPSU will be seeking positive discriminatory measures.