Losing 5 days' pay is already more than a 1% cut over the duration of the agreement. This whole dispute seems to have descended into an episode of willy-waving stupidity and everyone is a loser.
Given how precarious Irish Rail's finances are, there is a real possibility of examinership or worse. Given that it would appear that the legal work was already done on this for the Dublin Bus dispute last year, I would think that the Department of Transport would have this worked out already. I am wondering if it could be unwise to renew an annual pass at this stage and mine is actually up at the end of this month.
It will be interesting to see how much sympathy there will be in the other CIE companies seeing as how they have already taken cuts on considerably lower salaries.
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