Dear member,

You are receiving this email because you are a Fórsa member who will be on strike from Tuesday 17^th October. My name is Seán McElhinney and I’m the Director of Membership in Fórsa. I’m writing with some very important information about the steps you need to take to receive your strike pay from the union.

Please read this email carefully before completing your strike pay registration to guarantee that your strike pay will be paid within October.

Within the next 24 hours, you will receive an email, from Mi-Voice, asking you to complete the first of the three steps. You will need to take care to complete these steps thoroughly and to provide us with all the information we require to pay your strike pay.

Provided you give us all the information we need, you can expect to receive your first strike pay payment before the end of the month.

Completed registrations will be prioritised over incomplete registrations and if you do not provide us with all the information we need, or if your registration is otherwise incomplete, you should not expect to receive any strike pay before the end of October.

To complete your registration, you will require:

1. A copy of your most recent payslip.
2. A copy or photo of the top of your bank statement, clearly showing your IBAN, BIC, and account name.
3. A phone number on which we can contact you.
4. An email address that you regularly monitor so that we can contact you.
5. An accurate calculation for the value of your normal, net (take-home) daily pay.

You should start collecting this information now, so that you are prepared to complete the strike pay registration form when you receive the link by email tomorrow.

The First Step: Complete the online form.

Tomorrow (6^th of October), you will receive an email containing a link to an online form.

The online form will be hosted by our partners, Mi-Voice. The information you will be asked to provide will be:

1. Your unique reference number (you’ll find your unique reference number in tomorrow’s email – the subject line will be “Strike Pay: Register Now”).
2. Your first name and surname.
3. Your email address.
4. Your mobile phone number.
5. Your employer’s name.
6. Your workplace (full address including Eircode).
7. Your local picket (you will select this from a list – this will be important when you come to fulfilling the requirements of the third step).
8. How much you’re normally paid, per day, after tax and deductions.

Start preparing to complete step one, by collecting this information now.

To calculate how much you’re normally paid, per day, after tax and deductions:

1. You should obtain your most recent payslip.
2. Identify the amount of pay you actually received for the time you worked. This is known as your “net pay” or “take home pay” and it’s the amount found on the bottom line of your payslip.
3. You should divide the amount of pay you received by the number of days you worked within that pay period. For example, if you’re paid weekly and you worked five days in the pay period on your payslip, you should divide your take home pay by five. If you’re paid fortnightly and you worked ten days in the pay period, you should divide your take home pay by ten – and so on.

If your most recent payslip was different to what you would normally receive, you can base your daily-rate calculation on another payslip.

You’ll be asked to provide a copy of your payslip in step two and it’s important that you provide us with a copy of the payslip that you used to make your calculation. If it’s not your most recent payslip, you’ll need to tell us why you’ve selected a different one.

The Second Step: Send us your payslip and an image of the top of your bank statement.

Shortly after you complete the online form in the first step, you will receive another email from Mi-Voice, detailing the action you need to take for the second step. The second step is so Fórsa can collect the information we need to pay you, and for this we need photos that can’t be uploaded to Mi-Voice.

You will be asked to:

• Send an email to strikepay@forsa.ie with your unique reference number in the subject line.
• Attach a copy or a photo of your most recent payslip (or whichever payslip you have used to calculate the value of your net daily pay). If it’s not your most recent payslip, you’ll need to tell us why.

• Attach a copy or photo of the top part of your bank statement. We don’t need to see any information about your account balance or transactions. We’re looking for your IBAN, BIC, and account name but we need to see it as it’s presented on the top of your bank statement.

If you do not send us copies of your payslip and an image of the top part of your bank statement, we will treat your strike pay registration as incomplete, deprioritise your registration, and may not follow-up until we have processed other, completed registrations. This could delay the payment of your strike pay.

Once you’ve completed the second step and we’ve processed your registration, you will receive a short email confirming:

1. The value of your net daily-rate.
2. Your local picket (for the purpose of completing the third step).
3. Details about what you need to do to complete the third step.

The Third Step: Attend your local picket on strike days.

On strike days, you will be required to attend your local picket and “sign-in”. This is to confirm that you have taken strike action.

Sign-in registers will be held at each local picket and when you attend, you should physically sign-in on the written register.

Please note that others cannot sign-in for you. It must be you who signs in. If you do not sign-in, we may not process your strike pay.

What you need to do now:

Firstly, I need you to ask your co-workers if they’ve seen this email. They should check their spam or junk folders too.

If they haven’t received this email (and they’re in membership of Fórsa), they need to contact hwballot2023@forsa.ie immediately.

In their email, they need to tell us who they are, where they work, and provide us with an up-to-date email address.

Secondly, I need you to start gathering up the information we’re going to need when it comes to processing your strike pay registration.

Thank you for taking the time to read this important communication.

In solidarity,

Seán.