Sources on both sides of the Bank of Ireland pay dispute have admitted that reaching resolution on the issue is unlikely unless it can be established what the staff involved actually do for a living.
A leading banker told The Mire that the fundamentals of banking had changed so much recently that it was by no means clear that bank staff had jobs to do. “Let’s face it, we don’t lend money, any more and there aren’t too many people mad enough to deposit money with us,” he said. “We can’t give people pay increases for jobs that don’t exist.”
However, a trade union official, while acknowledging an essential truth about the current nature of banking, said the simple fact that people had offices to go to was enough to prove that they had jobs. “These people have jobs,” he said. “They might not have work but they do have jobs.”
He said that questioning fundamentals like what people do and whether it is needed is a “toxic proposal” that would mean descending below a “threshold of decency in the country”.
“It has reached the stage in public discourse in Mireland where the most preposterous proposals can be put forward and accepted as being legitimate and I reject that absolutely and completely,” he said.
