SIPTU executive recommends national pay deal

THE National Executive of the country’s largest trade union, SIPTU, yesterday came out in favour of the terms of the national ‘Towards 2016’ partnership agreement.

After a meeting on Tuesday night and yesterday morning, the executive concluded that “the balance of advantage” lay in accepting the terms of the agreement.

The 260,000 union electorate will now vote on whether or not to accept the deal, which runs for 27 months from January 1 of this year, with the ballot starting on Monday next and running for five weeks.

Yesterday’s SIPTU executive backing for the agreement follows Tuesday’s special delegate conference, where aspects of the deal were debated.

Union figures said the key issues that swung the mood in favour of accepting the deal were measures to better protect workers’ rights, and the fact that the proposed 10% pay increase would exceed all available projections of inflation, over the 27 month period.

The main unions still strongly against the agreement are the TUI, ASTI, Mandate and the ATGWU, but SIPTU’s backing for the deal is in line with that of public sector unions and many in the private sector.

ICTU convenes on September 5, when the final decision will emerge.

SIPTU general President Jack O’Connor admitted yesterday that the union had not achieved all it wanted on certain points in the agreement, but warned that it was impossible to get a better deal than that achieved in the talks over the past two years.

“During the course of our assessment we appreciated very clearly that we did not achieve all of our objectives,” Mr O’Connor said.

“We recognise that we would liked to have done better with respect of the low paid, for example.

“All of us involved in the process, in the last two years, are very firmly of the view that it is most unlikely that any additional progress would be made through attempted re-negotiations.”

In the Dáil, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern dismissed criticism that the agreement essentially covered only workers in the public service.

“Some have argued that the draft agreement, insofar as it relates to pay and the workplace, is really relevant only to a minority of private sector employees who are trade union members, and that it is essentially a public service pay agreement. This displays a grave misunderstanding of how the Irish labour market works,” Mr Ahern said.

“While it may be true that a majority of employees in the private sector at any one time are not organised members of trade unions, it is equally a fact that wage determination is always shaped by the organised sectors, within the context of underlying labour market conditions."