Nurses' deal clears way for talks on new national agreement

Delegates at a special conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions held in November 1999 decided to enter talks on a new national agreement to replace Partnership 2000, which expires on 31 March 2000. The decision followed the resolution of a major strike by nurses.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) held a special conference on 4 November 1999 to discuss a successor to the current three-year national agreement, Partnership 2000 (P2000) (IE9702103F). Delegates met in the immediate aftermath of a nine-day national strike by 27,000 nurses in Ireland's state-funded hospital service (IE9910297N). The nurses had been on strike from 19-27 October in a bid to wrest substantial pay increases from the government, despite being constrained from doing so by successive national agreements.

In the end, the nurses secured some minor concessions above what they had already been offered. Overall, however, most observers agreed that the government held firm once the strike started. The government felt it had to "face down" the nurses in order to send a strong message to other public servants. Over a two-year period, the nurses secured - through various sets of negotiations - pay rises totaling 26% on top of agreed basic pay rises. This is well ahead of other public sector groups whose additional "special" local bargaining increases vary from 5.5% to 14% over the same period.

Meanwhile, ICTU, the government and the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC), are all now committed to negotiating a fifth successive national programme, after the ICTU conference voted overwhelmingly in favour of entering talks.

For most observers, the key element in any new national programme remains the pay agreement and whether this can achieve the twin aims of delivering real net gains to union members, whilst sustaining the hard-won competitiveness gains secured by employers over the past 12 years. There is evidence that P2000 provided for pay stability in the main, but still allowed for the voluntary development of some degree of profit-sharing, gainsharing or other performance-related elements at the level of the enterprise (IE9911146F).

Des Geraghty, the newly appointed president of Ireland's largest union, the Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU), was critical of the public sector unions and their members in general. He told ICTU delegates that public servants could not continue to demand so-called "special pay" increases without affecting their colleagues in the private sector. "If we descend into mere sectionalism, if we descend into differentials as we did in the past, if we descend into the worst form of dog-eat-dog capitalism, the strong will succeed and the poor will go the wall," he warned.