The 19 public sector unions, affiliated to the ICTU Public Services Committee (PSC), will meet this morning (Friday) to consider the invitation to public service pay talks. The invitation, to enter negotiations on a new pay agreement, was issued by the Minister for Public Expenditure this week. This morning’s meeting of affiliates will review recent developments and determine the criteria to establish if there’s a basis for a new public service pay agreement with the Government. 

Speaking ahead of the meeting, Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan, who chairs the PSC, said he noted the comments, made by the Minister for Public Expenditure in his invitation, that an agreement has the potential to provide certainty and stability in a ‘normalised industrial relations environment.’

Kevin commented: “We’ve identified the normalisation of 'post-crisis' public service industrial relations as a necessary step to the successful negotiation of another public service agreement. That means removing the stranglehold of the Department of Public Expenditure, which is currently preventing the normal operation of the voluntarist system of industrial relations.

“Our priority objective is to secure appropriate pay measures in response to continuing cost-of-living pressures on working families. But the type of agreement favoured by the minister, as he described in media interviews this week, is really only achievable if we establish normalised industrial relations,” he said.

Kevin said the affiliate unions want a focus on the stabilisation of any future agreement, through mechanisms to resolve outstanding issues affecting public service grades, groups and categories: “Multi-annual deals provide a high degree of cost certainty, and stability, for the government. While we’re willing to consider such a deal, we made it clear months ago that any deal would need to contain sufficient flexibility to address issues affecting specific groups of workers,” he said.

The current public service pay agreement, Building Momentum, expires in just over six weeks (31st December). Unions have continued to emphasise the need for a successor agreement to be negotiated and ratified before the current deal expires.