The Unmaking of a Deal

How the Post office Workers Union came to reject a deal which has been in the making for ten years
The narrow rejection by post office technicians of proposals for reeorganisation of the P & T's engineering branch presents Padraig Faulkner and the country's phone subscribers with another headache. As before, the minisster will try to explain it away by referrring to divisions in the union, the Irish Post Office Engineering Union (IPOEU).

And division there is - fostered and proomoted by the Department's proposals for a new grading structure and for the distribution of the savings which will be realised through increased productivity. It is not the division between city and country which the media have claimed to see, nor even the division between moderates and militants although difffering political attitudes do come into it. It is that between technical and manual grades. Department Council No. 712, the 40-page document which spelt out the re-organisation and productivity proposals, opens up new senior grades for the most qualified 'technicians and deprives those in the lowest manual and trainee grades of any of the rewards for improved productivity.

Both the "official side", as it is known, and the union negotiators must have realised that the agreed terms would be seen as unbalanced. But, then, the four negotiators who, along with union general secretary, Seamus de Paor, represented the IPOEU, are all either technical officers or senior techhnicians. For years, these grades, containning men based in exchanges as distinct from those doing installation and mainntenance work, have been disproportioonately represented in the hierarchy of the union. Eight of the 11 executive members who voted in favour of the proposals are in the technological sector, and all but one of these would have benefitted directly from the re-grading. Union branch chairmen and secretaries around the country also tend to come from these grades. Their aspiration to establish a technical officer grade which would be compared with an equivalent grade elsewhere in the public service was met by the proposals negotiated beetween April and September. Promotion into this grade would have been virtuallly closed off from anybody not entering as a technician trainee and completing the three-year training course.

In the three weeks between the re~ lease of the details of the agreed scheme and the closing of the ballot, four IPOEU executive members who resigned rather than recommend acceptance waged an intensive campaign to have the deal thrown out. It was probably unique in the recent history of Irish trade unions, taking each of them to about ten meetings in different parts of the country during the two weeks of voting. The meetings were staggered to allow one of the negotiators to attend each of them, so at all but a handful of the 46 branches their case was matched against that of the four resigned executive members, all of whom work in the maintenance installation.

Apart from their objections to the proposed re-grading and the uneven disstribution of wage increases, which rangg: ed from nope at all for a quarter of the union's membership to nearly 20 per cent for the most senior, the four oppponents of the deal objected to the very open hand given to the Department to introd uce new working methods. Over 20 times in the package an opening is created for new methods "where the Department thinks it would be in the interests of efficiency to use them?', or some such phrase.

The four started their campaign with a large meeting in Dublin's Liberty Hall the day after the proposals became known. There, they listed 16 specific objections to the "sell-out". In a fourrpage pamphlet they later drew attention to the apparent reservation of the three independent assessors (who, for once, did not include Charles McCarthy; the Department would not accept him) about the proposed re-grading, and they wamed that the wage increases - averaaging £6 each - depended on certain prood uctivity increases being achieved d urring the following year. 'It is quite likely that the wage 'scales now being offered will not be sustained .. .'

The leaflets came back in response not signed by the executive, but eviidently emanating from the union's head office. The first one was measured, askking members to "consider carefully the consequences of voting against accepptance". The second one was headlined "Acceptance or Chaos-Organised Labbour in Danger" and denounced the "minority group of extreme left-wing agitators" and the "small minority of agitators who do not want industrial peace al all. "As a footnote it added that a meeting on the IPOEU had been organised by John Throne, "a self-professed Marxist", editor of Militant Irish Monthly, 'a communist organ'.

The red scare didn't work. In one branch, the committee had decided not to invite one of the "minority group" to address the meeting, but its decission was over-turned. Only once did the opponents of the scheme not get a hearing. Technology is changing fast in J telecommunications - maintenance staff are now being trained in the service of micro-processors - and the post office technicians want to be geared to take full advantage of the changes. Ten years ago, they started preparing the' reeorganisation claim which finally led to the proposals which have just been reejected. Frustrated phone subscribers will be hoping that it will not take another ten years to produce an acceptable deal.