ASTI to recommend pay deal rejection

THE executive committee of secondary schoolteachers’ union ASTI yesterday confirmed it would be recommending its 18,000 public sector members reject the public service pay deal.

The decision was not unexpected given the hostile reception the deal was given at the union’s annual conference earlier this week.

“The main problem was that they (the executive members) did not feel there was a guarantee in relation to further pay cuts and there was a vagueness around changes to teachers’ contracts,” said a spokeswoman for the union.

She added that given that workers had already suffered a 15% cut in their wages through the pension levy and pay cuts in the last budget, the bailout of the banks was all the more galling.

Joining ASTI in rejecting the deal yesterday was Unite trade union which has 6,000 public service members.

“The agreement seeks to copper-fasten this government’s misguided policy of taking money out of the real economy to prop up the very institutions that caused our economic meltdown in the first place,” said the union’s regional secretary, Jimmy Kelly.

“The promise of ‘jam tomorrow’ is wholly undermined by the actions taking place in banking and insurance.”

He said €8 billion as a minimum had gone into Anglo Irish Bank which has no long-term future benefit for anybody other than overseas bond holders.

“This is like Alice in Wonderland and the membership of Unite and other trade unions needs to stand up and inject a dose of common sense.”

In both ASTI and Unite, members will now be asked to take part in a ballot with their executive’s recommendations as guidance.

On Tuesday, the executives of two other unions, SIPTU (70,000 public service members) and the Irish Nurses and Midwives (40,000 members), will meet to decide what to recommend to their memberships.

To date, executives of unions with a combined membership of almost 100,000 public servants have advised their members to reject the deal.

The survival of the agreement hammered out between unions and the Government at Croke Park almost two weeks ago was dealt a major blow when the executive of IMPACT recommended rejection.

If a similar recommendation was made by the SIPTU executive on Tuesday and the memberships of both unions were to follow their leaders’ advice in their various ballots, those results would almost be enough to consign the deal to the scrap heap even without the results from the 10 other union ballots.