Union delegates want public-sector pay increases of over 10%
The Fórsa union's national conference at the INEC Killarney. Picture: Domnick Walsh
The head of Ireland’s largest public-sector trade union has declined to reveal the size of the pay increase his body will seek from the Government, despite some of his delegates calling for hikes of more than 10%.
Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan said his members “don’t want me or others to start plucking figures out of the sky”.
“What they expect us to do is to negotiate and to get the best deal possible and to consult with them in due course, depending on what way the thing is framed,” he told the .
Mr Callinan’s comments followed an apparent loosening of the Government’s position on a prospective pay increase for the public sector after Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath said: “We are prepared to go beyond the pay terms of the current agreement”.
However, Mr McGrath said any increase would need to be “balanced against the risk of doing any long-term damage to the economy”.
Fórsa is set to meet with Mr McGrath’s officials next week ahead of the commencement of pay talks aimed at securing a new public-sector pay agreement to 2020’s Building Momentum.
In his keynote speech at Fórsa’s national conference in Killarney, Mr Callinan moved a motion, which passed unanimously, that tackling the cost-of-living challenges currently being seen in Ireland would be his union’s number one priority going forward.
He said the impact of inflation on living standards “demands more than a talking shop”, adding that given household commodity prices are set to remain historically high until 2024, “the value of Irish social dialogue will be measured by outcomes, not the number of meetings scheduled”.
Mr Callinan said Fórsa would pursue that agenda with a “single-minded determination”, and that there is now a solid basis for such negotiations, given the Government has acknowledged that the inflation assumptions contained in Building Momentum have changed significantly in the 18 months since its agreement.
During the debate ahead of the vote on that motion, some members among the 700 gathered delegates had argued that the union should seek pay hikes of more than 10%, given that inflation is currently running at more than 6%, with one branch even advocating for a 30% increase, before withdrawing their own proposal before it could be voted upon.
The other main focus of the conference, which earlier saw a vote return current president Michael Smyth to his role for an additional term, was the issue of remote working, with a motion passed in the afternoon dismissing the legislation on the issue proposed by the Government earlier this year as “effectively useless”, and committing to seeking “fair access” to remote and blended work.
Irish unions have been sharply critical of the Government’s Right to Request Remote Work Bill, first introduced in January of this year, predominantly for the 13 reasons it contains by which employers could refuse a request to work remotely.
Seconding the motion at the conference, Fórsa national secretary Bernard Harbor said that the draft legislation’s “non-existent” appeals mechanisms” had “cemented our assessment that the proposed law was effectively useless”.
Mr Callinan said: “I think in fairness the Tánaiste had accepted that the bill hadn’t landed well, and in various consultations he’s indicated that they’d revisit that.”
