NUJ rejects proposal on pay increase

MEMBERS of the National Union of Journalists working at the Irish Examiner and Evening Echo are to vote on taking industrial action after rejecting a proposed pay increase recommended by the Labour Court.

Journalists at the company’s Cork and Dublin offices voted by four-to-one to reject the pay and pensions proposal which had been recommended by the court.

The mandatory union meetings on the pay issue were attended by 74 of the 120 plus NUJ members working on the two newspapers.

A spokesperson for the NUJ chapel (branch) said that the next step is to ballot for industrial action in pursuit of its claim for wage increases of 15% over the course of a proposed three-year deal.

Irish Examiner chief executive Tom Murphy said that he was extremely disappointed that the company has received no communication whatsoever from the NUJ in relation to its ballot.

“The offer put to the NUJ members was the same offer accepted by all other staff — in fact it has already been paid to everyone else.

“In addition, the profit sharing amount for each employee in 2006 has been increased by 5.3% to €3,000.

“There are elements of this Labour Court recommendation with which we could take issue but in the greater scheme of things we decided to accept the court’s decision.

“We similarly accepted a Labour Court decision in relation to aspects of the canteen facilities provided in our new offices last November,” he said.

The NUJ believes that the Labour Court finding failed to redress what itbelieve to be historicalpay losses of almost 12% incurred since the beginning of national wage agreements in 1998.

“The other titles in the TCH group are given the deals which the government agrees with its social partners. The Irish Examiner and the Evening Echo are the only two titles which have to negotiate their pay deals, and we have consistently lost against this benchmark,” the union said.

Non-NUJ staff at the Irish Examiner and Evening Echo have completed negotiations which delivered pay increases of 4%, 4% and 4.5% to cover the years 2006, 2007 and 2008. They also accepted that the company’s profit share arrangement was not pensionable.

The Labour Court proposed similar wage increases for journalists in its recommendation but added an amendment in relation to the future operation of the company’s defined contribution pension scheme.

The Labour Court recommendation proposed that journalists on the company’s DC pension scheme should be allowed to have the proceeds from the annual profit share made pensionable if they wished, with the appropriate contributions paid by the company and the individual.

However, the Labour Court said that it was “cognisant of the major funding implications” the pension claim would have on the defined benefitpension scheme andwas not recommending concession of the claim to members of this scheme.