Tough task to convince drivers to end strike
Following 19 hours of negotiations at the Labour Relations Commission between the company and SIPTU, the two sides emerged with an agreed document setting out a roadmap for a return to work for Cork drivers this afternoon.
At 11.00am the unions will meet with the 40 drivers in the Metropole Hotel in Cork to outline what is at stake. Sources are indicating they will have a hard job getting agreement.
If the document is accepted by the drivers they will return to work this afternoon. If it is not, the unofficial industrial action continues and threatens to spread into a national strike.
No matter which outcome emerges, commuters i face an eighth morning without service. Iarnród Éireann has already been forced to cancel all nine intercity trains to and from Cork and Tralee as well as the Cork/Cobh, Cork/Mallow and Cork/ Tralee commuter services. Even if the drivers agree to return the first services will not run before 1.00pm.
Whether trains operate after that time is by no means guaranteed. The document agreed to by the unions and company is not being made public until the drivers see it this morning.
However, it is believed the document will require Cork drivers to forgo local agreements which, it is claimed, effectively gives them an extra day off each week compared to drivers elsewhere.
All train drivers are expected to drive on four of their five-day working week. On the fifth they do “other duties”. However, while most of the country is expected to at least come to work for that day and then go home if there is no work to do, Cork drivers, under a local agreement, do not even have to turn up.
The new document maintains they will have to do all the same work as their Dublin colleagues. In addition, it is understood the unions have agreed to allow their members to be sanctioned if they engage in unofficial industrial action.
The one obvious climbdown by the company is that it is no longer demanding the workers individually give signed guarantees that they will never again engage in unofficial strike action.
Last night one Cork driver said he and his colleagues had been through many tough battles and he just did not know how this morning’s meeting would go.
“The union is going to have to be able to give us assurances that whatever has been agreed between them and the company is not going to backfire on us down the line,” he said
The source added that claims by the company that Cork drivers were doing less work than their counterparts in Dublin, was not true. “In most cases we are doing more,” he said. “We are working rostered hours as agreed in the Labour Court ruling of 2000.”
If the union sells the agreement, they will still need to return to the LRC sion to discuss a number of outstanding issues.
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