Growing internal divisions between trade unions are hampering the government's efforts to press ahead this week with an agreement for a 1.3 billion cut in the public sector's pay bill next year.
Civil-service unions are refusing to back the outright opposition to the cuts mounted by nursing, garda and prison officer unions, but the government insists it will proceed with a 6.85% cut in the public payroll without a unified approach from its employees.
From Tuesday, officials and public-sector unions will start working through a menu of possible payroll savings, including discussions on overtime, allowances and increments to frontline service workers.
Civil servants have offered to take two weeks off the state payroll in unpaid extra holidays. Leaders of the 24/7 Frontline Services Alliance (FSA), however, whose members are more reliant on overtime, allowances and premium payments than other public servants, do not have that option and fear their salaries may be cut by up to 15% if these payments are reduced.
Leaders of the FSA, which also represents the fire and ambulance services, wrote to the public-service committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) on Tuesday to discuss a joint strategy for cutting the public sector pay bill. Peter McLoone, the committee chairman, has so far failed to reply.
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Government officials told the unions last week that up to 20% of the payrolls of the health service, education sector, garda and prison service were made up of premium pay and special allowances. In contrast, overtime and increments comprise just 27m of the 2 billion wages bill for civil servants in 15 government departments. Overtime and allowances add 1.1 billion (21%) to the 5.3 billion core-pay bill in the health service, and 685m (16.3%) to the 4.2 billion core pay in the education sector.
"The reality is that the value of premium pay and allowances is at least a quarter of our members' pay," said Des Kavanagh, the chairman of the FSA, which represents 300,000 members in various unions. "Any combination of pay allowance cuts [that has been canvassed so far] would cost our members around 15% of their pay."
Officials say the lack of a common union position has complicated the talks. Officials from the Department of Finance held sectoral talks with groups of unions last week to try to make progress.
"There isn't a fully developed common policy on the union side," said one official. "Obviously the 24/7 Frontline Alliance are not fans of going near the allowances whereas the Civil, Public & Services Union gets very little in the way of allowances and overtime and wouldn't miss them terribly."