Pay deal process attacked by union leader

ONE of the country’s longest-serving trade union leaders has attacked the social partnership pay deal process and called for a major overhaul.

General secretary of the Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) Jim Dorney said his 12,000 members and other public servants are being expected to modernise in return for pay rises that do not match inflation.

The Towards 2016 pay deal which lapses in a year’s time gives annual increases of 4.6%, but the average inflation rate this year is expected to be more than 5%.

“This effectively means that wages will not have kept pace with the cost of living, effectively a pay cut in circumstances in which economic growth last year was running at 6%,” said Mr Dorney said in a TUI News magazine article

“Not only have wages not kept pace with inflation, but workers have not shared in the growth they helped to create. This is an issue that will have to be addressed in future wage agreements,” he said.

While teachers are expected to benefit from pay awards by the Public Service Benchmarking Body later this year, Mr Dorney said these rises were conditional on delivery of modernisation. In the case of teachers, a standardised school year, parent-teacher meetings outside school hours and new arrangements for redeploying surplus teachers have already been delivered since the first benchmarking report published in 2002, which gave them a 13% hike on top of national wage deal rises.

Mr Dorney, who will retire after 25 years at the helm in TUI next February, also expressed concern about the mechanism used by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) to accept or reject wage agreements. Pay and modernisation terms are subject to an aggregate vote of all affiliated unions, but TUI voted against Towards 2016 when it was considered by ICTU a year ago.

“This mechanism may be understandable in respect of pay increases, but it makes no sense for modernisation proposals for a group such as teachers to be accepted by other groups of workers who have no interest or concern with them,” he said.

This issue needs to be addressed in any future agreement, said Mr Dorney.