Leo’s comments may help put pay talks back on track

IT JUST takes a few actions or pieces of rhetoric on the part of either a union representative or an employer to not only throw a workplace into industrial turmoil but also influence the court of public opinion on who is right and who is wrong.

Those actions or words often come in the aftermath of an often convoluted and unrewarding negotiating process where one or both of the parties have failed to move from their default positions and the process has ultimately stalled.

Take the recent pensions furore at ESB which threatened to plunge the whole country into darkness over the Christmas period. As the public face of the union campaign, Brendan Ogle’s frequent print, television, and radio utterances helped galvanise the determination of workers to defend themselves even if it might alienate them in the eyes of the country.

The campaign was successful — unions ultimately received much of the assurances from management they required. It did come at a cost to Mr Ogle, gaining him death threats for the stance he was seen as creating.

The modus operandi adopted by the Government in such disputes, particularly in the private sector, has traditionally been to stand on the sidelines cheering for commonsense and, when push comes to shove, asking a third party mediator to come to the rescue.

However the evidence of the last 12 months has shown that Transport Minister Leo Varadkar is determined to break with that tradition, particularly when it comes to the CIÉ group of transport companies.

The latest example came yesterday when the minister was quoted as saying he could see strike action happening in the next “one or two months” at Iarnród Éireann over the company’s plans to cut payroll costs by up to €5m from the staff pay bill.

The comments came out of the blue. While the rail company and its unions had never denied the existence of obstacles in place to an agreement, but said their differences were not insurmountable. Certainly prior to the minister’s comments, neither had said in recent days that strikes were imminent.

Therefore it might be seen that the minister is needlessly throwing a match into an already incendiary situation.

However viewed in the context of past form, his remark in the newspaper interview becomes less off-the-wall.

Two weeks of talks between the two sides at the Labour Relations Commission prior to Christmas failed to reach agreement.

Those talks had come a full 12 months after the company had announced it needed €8.5m in savings and that €4.7m of that total had to come from staff efficiencies. The summer had seen the emergence of a set of third-party proposals.

However, when those proposals were put to the company’s workforce, they were roundly rejected.

Rewind to May last year and Mr Varadkar was pointing out that a similar impasse remained between Dublin Bus and its unions after 14 months of talks — involving numerous meetings at the LRC.

In that dispute, the minister lobbed in a different type of grenade to concentrate the minds.

Last September, he announced his department was working on a replacement transport system for the capital in the event that Dublin Bus ceased to operate due to its financial difficulties — difficulties that needed trade union agreement in order to resolve.

Within two months, a resolution had been achieved which averted further strike action and allowed the company to make the savings required.

His timebomb during the talks to find savings in Bus Éireann was less subtle — even his junior colleague said he had “probably done better interviews”.

On that occasion last May, as unions and the bus company were in the middle of round-the-clock negotiations with the threat of strike action hanging over proceedings, Mr Varadkar told reporters he would “rather see us go back into a strike situation than have an agreement that does not deliver the necessary savings to protect passenger services”.

At the time, sources close to the talks said it would be an understatement to say the minister’s comments were “not taken well” by the trade union movement and it did “cause a setback”.

Nonetheless, by the following day, a deal had emerged which the negotiators broadly agreed upon and which delivered the required €5m in savings.