Unions set to oppose NAMA creation

TRADE unions are to lead a campaign opposing the controversial Government plan to create a National Assets Management Agency to take over €90 billion in banks’ “toxic assets”.

The likely adoption of a strategy of confrontation with the Government follows Taoiseach Brian Cowen’s refusal to sign up to the concept of a “social dividend” and protection of workers’ jobs and pensions at the now suspended social partnership talks.

Yesterday, representatives of the unions, employers’ groups and the Government all privately admitted they expected 25 years of social partnership to formally end next Tuesday when the cabinet and national executive of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions hold separate scheduled meetings.

A senior trade union source said the movement would turn its attention “to the contradiction that NAMA represents where the Government can go out and borrow about €60bn to buy the toxic assets of the banks, when you can pick up the entire banks for a fraction of that cost, but they can’t find €1bn for a jobs retention fund”.

SIPTU general president Jack O’Connor said we are faced with enormous problems “that would require a supreme national effort”.

He added that rather than pursue such an effort the Government seemed more concerned with “prostrating themselves in front of international financial capital” in a strategy which in the long run would only benefit the “better off”.

Yesterday, employers’ group IBEC stated that they in broad terms supported ICTU’s €1bn package of measures to protect jobs.

IBEC director general Turlough O’Sullivan said employers and unions were “singing from the same hymn sheet”.

However, a Government source said that it is very unlikely that a deal would be reached on an “old style, traditional” social partnership agreement.

A provisional deadline for reaching agreement on a national economic recovery plan passed yesterday.

The Government sources said a traditional deal, which would usually include some element of national agreement on pay, did not suit the present economic climate.

The failure to reach such a deal will see a return to “localised wage bargaining” and greatly increase the likelihood of strike action.