The announcement on the 19th October 2011 that 950 jobs are to go at Aviva along with the distinct possibility that another 300 jobs will be outsourced in the near future, is the culmination of rumours that have been circulating for the past few months. It obviously made the 6 o’clock evening news with an outside broadcast interview with an employee and a union man from outside company headquarters in central Dublin.

The employee was pale and shell-shocked at the prospect of losing his livelihood but the union man was invigorated by the “excellent” meeting that they had just had with the employees and the fact that a ballot for industrial action would definitely be going ahead in the following days. Hopefully, this comment was just an ego flush in the heat of the moment in front of all those TV cameras…because if it wasn’t….

When will the unions understand what is going on in the real world? They are behaving like they are back in suffragette city and mistakenly believe that their aggressive stance will make huge multi-national employers back down. It is breathtakingly arrogant of them not to consider the plight of the remaining employees. The threat of industrial action would surely put the remaining 1000 odd jobs at risk.

The last four years have brought serious realistic adjustments to the non-unionized private sector in Ireland, where there has been huge job attrition and index-linked salary reductions for those jobs that have survived. These adjustments have been necessary and have restored the competitiveness of many Irish workplaces as evidenced by our excellent export trade surplus. But there have been insufficient reductions in the public sector, because guess-who is in charge?

Through bench-marking, introduced circa 2002 by the social partners to equalize pubic and private pay, there were substantial increases in public pay, which were affordable during the Tiger years. That bench-marking never delivered the promised productivity or indeed the necessary accountability required of all employment positions. What we have had is a catalogue of cock-ups, cost over-runs and general hand washing for all of the things that have gone wrong.

What the unions have failed to realize is that bench-marking is a two-way street and like property, what goes up, sometimes has to come down – they are still in denial despite all that has happened and until they appreciate the fact that some of the greatest places to work in Ireland are non-unionized environments, they will never be able to achieve the humility to step down quietly and let market forces dictate. I am sure that this is something that the as yet unidentified remaining employees at Aviva are earnestly hoping for !