Following Wednesday’s successful one-day stoppage, there were meetings of union members yesterday (Friday) to set up roster’s and make other preparations for similar industrial action on Wednesday 21st October. On Friday evening, however, a message was sent round indicating that next week’s strike action had been suspended on the grounds that a process had been agreed to construct a process for formal pay talks. That announcement made it onto the news last night.
It is of course a good thing that the Government that has decided to move, but it is important to realize that this is not a victory. Nothing has been agreed, and the mandate achieved via balloting is still in place, so the industrial action is suspended rather than cancelled. Unions that were previously working to rule will continue to do so.
Given the antics of the Government over the last few weeks, there isn’t much trust or goodwill going around so they will have to work to restore what they have damaged. There’s more than a suspicion that the Government might just be trying to kick this issue into the long grass (again). Let’s hope that’s not the case, and the negotiators can quickly come up with a deal that is acceptable to union members. If they can’t, we’ll go back to industrial action. One thing the strikes definitely did achieve was to encourage more employees to join a union and build common cause with those who were already members.
We should have been at this point more than six months ago, and I doubt the reason it didn’t was simply sloth (although there’s a lot of that about in Government circles these days). It’s more likely that the Minister for Public Expenditure was posing as a strong man to further his own political ambitions. The Taoiseach himself intervened to set up the process now in place. I don’t know what persuaded him to get involved. The strikes on Wednesday were solid, for one thing, but I suspect of greater importance was the high-level of public support for the strikers. Jack Chambers seemed to be trying to deploy the usual divide-and-conquer approach favoured by his ilk by setting the public against the strikers, but that didn’t work, and without a Plan B he was floundering.
It is uncertain what will happen in the longer term, but next Wednesday’s lectures will go ahead.
