Talks on a new public sector pay deal will resume on Tuesday as unions said they were finalising plans to ballot members on potential industrial action.
The State has enjoyed broad industrial peace for over a decade thanks to successive pay agreements with its 385,000 public servants. The most recent deal expired at the end of December and talks on a successor broke up without agreement last month.
That prompted unions to threaten industrial action and they are due to meet on Thursday to finalise the wording of ballots. The process of balloting members usually takes a few weeks, providing a further window for a new deal to be struck.
Kevin Callinan, the general secretary of Fórsa, the largest public sector union, said any new deal would need to compensate members' recent loss in real wages after their average total pay increase of 9.5 per cent over the last three years roughly equated to half the rate of inflation.
He said the deal would also need to take account of the projected rate of inflation, which the Department of Finance sees falling to 2.9 per cent this year, 2.4 per cent next year and 1.9 per cent in 2026. Callinan said he thinks it will be closer to 4 per cent this year.
"A big part of this is we have no clue whatsoever as to what they [the Government] have in mind in relation to pay," he told RTÉ on Monday.
Nominal wages per head across the economy grew by an average of 3.6 per cent in the first half of 2023. The Department of Finance forecasted in October that wages would rise by 4.6 per cent this year, 4.5 per cent next year and 4.3 per cent in 2026.
