THE IBOA UNION, which represents employees of the Irish Banking Resolution Corporation (IBRC), is to meet with the company’s special liquidators on Monday.
The meeting comes after IBRC workers threatened industrial action if necessary to secure “just severance” as part of a “campaign for fairness and respect” for staff. They voted for this in an IBOA (the finance union) ballot last Friday.
The special liquidators to the IBRC, Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG, have said that a meeting will take place with the IBOA on Monday 11 March.
According to Wallace and Richardson:
This date is the earliest available following the unavoidable postponement of the previously arranged meeting from yesterday morning (Wednesday), and the IBOA’s non-availability [on] Thursday and Friday.
According to an email seen by TheJournal.ie, IBRC staff were told that an agreed redundancy package was signed off in September 2011 by the bank and the Government. It would have entitled the staff to four weeks’ base pay per year of service, inclusive of statutory redundancy entitlement, to apply to redundancies made by the bank over the following five years and subject to annual review and no unforeseen budgetary deterioration.
It was also agreed that if compulsory redundancies became necessary, it was proposed these terms would apply to any such redundancies. Some departments were excluded from the above, but staff believed that the terms of the voluntary redundancy scheme would apply to them should compulsory redundancies be necessary.
IBRC workers said earlier this week that they will take industrial action if necessary to secure ‘just severance’ for them, as the liquidation of the bank on 7 February affected this 2011 agreement. They are instead entitled to statutory redundancy.
The staff are now asking for the commitments the Government made to them to be honoured, and the IBOA said on Monday that “it was not necessary to liquidate staff’s rights and agreements into the bargain” when the IBRC was liquidated to reach a deal on promissory notes.
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