Willie Kealy: Unions and company know of no quick fix

‘ISYMPATHISE with the bus workers but I wish their industrial action didn’t impact on me.” That has been a common reaction from commuters affected by the current bus strike. And it makes no sense at all.

A strike is a weapon of industrial relations and probably the only weapon that workers with a grievance have at their disposal. Of course, they could go on strike from two to six in the morning and everyone would be happy, but there would be no point, because the purpose of a strike is to inconvenience you, the commuter, so that you get annoyed and you transfer your annoyance to the management of Bus Éireann and to the Government. But in the end, the strike will solve nothing.

If the management of Bus Éireann was a greedy bunch of capitalists unwilling to share the wealth with the workers, the pressure of a strike, both moral and economic, might work. But that is not the case here.

Instead, you have the board of a semi-state company consistently losing millions of euro with no end in sight. If it allows that situation to continue, the company will become in solvent and everyone– management, workers and customers–will lose. And the members of the board could end up in jail for reckless trading. So they don’ t have a choice but to play hardball.

They say they want to make the company more efficient and the unions say they agree that must be done, but not at the expense of their wages. And indeed, the company cannot arbitrarily cut the basic wage of the employees. Again, it would run foul of the law. But there are tools at its disposal. Cutting back on overtime is one such tool. Overtime is a mechanism for filling gap sin roster sand, as such, it is at the discretion of management how that is deployed. It is difficult to see how overtime can be such a vital part of the operation of Bus Éireann when it employs five staff for every vehicle, compared to 1.8 in the private sector. But probably through bad management practices over the years, regular overtime seems to have become a constant component of the bus workers’ take-home pay, so that dealing with the overtime problem is now seen by the bus workers as cutting pay. It isn’t.

The other tool at management’s disposal is redundancy – not traditional redundancy, where your job disappears because of changing circumstances like mechanisation or a technological innovation. Instead, this is the modern form of redundancy born in our recent recession, where a management would figure out how much money it needed to save on its running costs and then translate that into job numbers. This tactic has been

deployed successfully throughout the private sector for a number of reasons. First is the virtual disappearance of an effective trade union movement in the private sector and a mantra that prevailed in the recession that you were “lucky to have a job at all”. It was first achieved through paying large sums of money, especially to those within sight of normal retirement, so that it made sense to take the package. Later, it was imposed with less generous terms.

The fact that most workers expressed a preference for seeing many of their colleagues lose their jobs, rather than take a cut in take-home pay for those who would remain, probably helps explain the mindset that has seen the trade union movement all but disappear in the private sector.

But redundancies alone are not the answer. Hand in hand with redundancies, there has to be productivity. This means that those who remain at work have to agree to change their working habits to take up the slack created by those who leave. (Productivity alone is not the answer either, because if the five bus workers for every vehicle were to work twice as hard, it would solve nothing, if everything else remained the same.)

In the private sector, remaining workers took up the challenge – often because they felt they had little choice. But in the State and semi-State sector, it is different. There, the trade union movement has remained strong, mainly because it realises that its ultimate employer, the government of the day, will always be susceptible to pressure, unwilling to be unpopular and ever-ready to buy its way out of a crisis with taxpayers’ money.

Transport Minister Shane Ross has not succumbed to that pressure, suggesting instead that the management and unions should first agree on every reasonable efficiency. Naturally, the unions don’t agree. They want to get the minister in a room where they can pressurise him to open the cheque book and solve the company’s problems by throwing money at them, thus minimising the contribution they would have to make to achieve a solution.

But it is inescapable that the problems of Bus Éireann must first be dealt with internally and in an industrial relations setting. However, it must also be accepted that there is nothing management or unions or the two combined can do that will magically turn Bus Éireann into a profitable company overnight. This is because the company is obliged to provide services which are loss-making and will always be loss-making – a service obligation which does not apply in the private sector.

So there is a political dimension to this mess too. And the minister and the Government cannot avoid facing up to that eventually. At some stage, they will have to decide if it is their policy to provide public transport on routes that are not and will never be profitable as a social service.

They could decide to make these loss-making routes part of what is put out to public tender but they would probably find few takers in the private sector. So ultimately they will have to decide whether or not loss-making routes must be part of Bus Éireann’s remit. If they want to keep the routes, then they must be prepared to pay after, and only after, all reasonable efficiencies have been achieved. If not, then they must decide to allow Bus Éireann to close these routes.

All the political parties could then decide which option they wish to support when the canvassing starts for the next general election.