Civil service unions have been invited to talks to try and address the lack of efficiencies in the dispute resolution mechanisms in the civil service following an intense campaign by Fórsa.

As it currently stands, civil service workers are excluded from taking cases to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) and Labour Court on all issues, with a few specific exceptions.

“When the WRC was established in 1946, civil service workers were excluded from the legal definition of ‘worker’ under the legislation and could not therefore bring cases before it,” explained Fórsa Deputy General Secretary Éamonn Donnelly.

“However, in response, the Government agreed to the adoption of the Conciliation and Arbitration (C&A) Scheme to provide a ‘mirror’ dispute resolution service of sorts. The difficulty with it is that it doesn’t really provide for conciliation at all. Additionally, there are no time limits built into it,” he continued.

Regarding the progression of personal grievances, Éamonn noted that there is no mechanism in place to resolve personal grievances, which is a substantial issue.

“There is no facility in the civil service for the resolution of personal grievances. Sometimes you can get all sides to agree on an outcome, but if you can’t, there’s nowhere to escalate it. This has become an acute problem in recent years in particular,” he said.

Looking forward to how the issue might be resolved at upcoming talks, Éamonn said that “full access to the WRC and Labour Court would be the best possible outcome” but noted the difficulties that may arise.

“Full access to the WRC and Labour Court would be the best possible outcome. However, there may be a legal wrangle with granting that access to civil service workers. If we can reconfigure the C&A scheme to build in a reliable conciliation mechanism and find a pathway to have personal grievances concluded, we’d go a long way to fixing the problem. It would be a great win for all civil service workers who currently have nowhere to go with unresolved issues,” he said.

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