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Health workers in the community and voluntary sector joined community employment (CE) supervisors on 14th February in a rally to call on the next government to address outstanding issues of pay and pensions in their respective sectors.

The rally was organised under the auspices of the Irish Congress of Trade Union's (ICTU) Community Sector Committee behind a message for the new government: “Unfinished business: Don’t ignore community services.”

Community Employment (CE) supervisors took part in a 24-hour work stoppage on the day, in their continuing dispute over the Government’s failure to implement a 2008 Labour Court recommendation to give CE supervisors access to an occupational pension scheme.

Workers in ‘Section 39’ agencies, under which independent voluntary organisations are funded by the HSE to deliver care and other services, took part in the rally a week before their 24-hour industrial action on 21st February. This marked the latest phase of a union campaign.

Addressing the rally at Government buildings in Dublin, Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan said: “A state that fails to take responsibility for the delivery of key services is an irresponsible state. A state that fails to treat the workers providing those key services fairly is an unjust state. A state that cuts these services, often to the weakest in our society, is a sick state.”

He criticised the outgoing Government’s lack of interest in convening a community sector forum, which was agreed as part of the 2015 Lansdowne Road agreement: “

Fórsa official Ian McDonnell said the next government must address pension provision for all workers. “It’s a significant challenge, and one that must be top-of-mind for the next administration, given its prominence as a general election issue.

“In the meantime, it would reflect well on the new administration to quickly deal with the unfinished business of CE supervisors. The cost of implementing the 2008 Labour Court recommendation is around €31 million, and a modest employer pension contribution would cost just €3.5 million a year,” he said.

Over 1,000 workers, many retired or approaching retirement, are suffering hardship because of successive governments’ failure to implement the Labour Court’s recommendation.

While unions have been successful in achieving pay restoration for significant numbers of members employed in section 39 organisations, members in smaller workplaces have yet to have benefit from a deal agreed in October 2018.

Fórsa official Catherine Keogh said: “It’s been a test of endurance for people who deliver vital health services in the community, for whom other work opportunities means we’re now witnessing much higher staff turnover in employments providing vital care services.

“The failure to complete the pay restoration process is putting the sustainability of these services at risk, which would place the burden of service delivery back on HSE.”

Media coverage

• Hundreds of community employment scheme supervisors to strike - The Irish Times (featuring case study of Fórsa member Gillian Byrne)
• Community employment schemes close due to strike - RTE SixOne news
• State-funded health agency and social services staff to strike - The Irish Times

Tens of thousands of childcare educators and providers joined parents earlier this month to protest about the high cost of childcare and low pay in the sector. Over 60% of childcare educators in Ireland earn below the living wage, while parents pay some of the highest fees in Europe.

The Dublin demonstration saw protestors calling on the incoming government to increase pay and funding for the childcare sector. They also called for more sustainability in the childcare profession.

The huge number of protestors also sent a clear and direct message to the incoming government that the issues in the childcare sector must be dealt with immediately as a matter of priority.

The average cost of childcare in Ireland amounted to €184 a week last year, up 3.4% from 2018 according to the figures released by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. Dublin recorded the highest full-time childcare fees, averaging at €251 per week.

Campaigners say parents have contributed over €100,000 to childcare services out of their own pockets in recent years. This could have been substantially reduced with the help of state funding.

Fórsa’s pre-election membership poll found 71% of public servants were willing to back parties that pledged publicly-provided and funded affordable childcare for working people.

Fórsa official and parent, Eimear Ryan said a new system of increased funding was needed to bring Ireland’s childcare system closer to the EU average.

“As a working mum with two small girls aged nearly five and three years old, I require full time early years’ service. They attend a wonderful professional service about five kilometres from my home, where they are happy, as am I knowing that all their needs are being provided for in my absence.

“I supported the rally 100% and I conveyed my full support as I leave my most precious possessions with these dedicated professional and highly skilled workers. I believe they play an integral part in early childhood care and education of my girls and deserve fair recognition for their work and appropriate terms and conditions of employment,” she said.

The average gender pay gap in Ireland has risen to 14.4%, according to the most recent estimates from the Central Statistics Office (CSO). The 2017 figure – based on the latest available data – compares to a significantly lower gap of below 12.6% during the recession.

The new research also revealed that the gap is wider for older workers, with younger women who recently entered the workforce suffering a gap of just 3%. This jumps to 15% for the 35-44 age group, which represents most young mothers, and stays high for those aged over 45.

This is largely due to the fact that women are far more likely than men to take time out of the workforce to care for children, which stalls their earnings and has a long-term impact on their future pay and promotion prospects.

The National Women’s Council of Ireland has also highlighted the high cost of childcare, which puts constraints on women’s participation in the workforce.

Fórsa has been at the forefront of campaigns for the introduction of new laws to compel employers to report their gender pay gap. Unions believe that legislation to oblige employers to disclose differences in pay between male and female employees – and explain the reasons for such imbalances – would highlight inequalities and encourage action to redress pay imbalances.

A Gender Pay Gap Information Bill stalled when the recent general election was called.

Fórsa had earlier criticised the previous Government for failing to back an opposition bill on gender pay gap reporting. It said the Fine Gael-led administration risked running out of time to pass the legislation after it insisted on publishing its own bill instead – a forecast that turned out to be correct.

It’s unlikely that further exploratory talks on a pay deal to succeed the Public Service Stability Agreement (PSSA) will take place before a new government is formed. Fórsa had been leading union efforts to negotiate a new accord prior to this month’s general election.

The union has said it will seek above-inflation pay rises in any new deal to take account of the rising cost of living, recent economic and exchequer growth, and pay movements across the economy. The Central Statistics Office reports that average private sector earnings are rising by nearly 4% a year.

Fórsa has also said it wants the negotiation to address additional working time introduced for many public servants during the recession – a stance supported by branches at the union’s Consultative Council earlier this month.

During the recent election, the union asked political parties to set out their policies on this, but none of the major parties made a specific commitment. This led Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan to warn the Consultative Council that branches and members faced a battle to win back hours lost under the Haddington Road agreement.

But he said the union would address the issue head-on.

In a survey of Fórsa members conducted in January, 94% said it was unacceptable that higher-paid public servants were having their pay fully restored to pre-crisis levels, while those on lower incomes were still working extra unpaid hours introduced during the recession.

The union’s pre-election campaign established that the three biggest parties plus Labour and the Social Democrats are explicitly in favour of doing a new public service pay deal.

Fórsa is among the supporters of a public forum on the future of the National Archives, which takes place in the Edmund Burke theatre in Dublin’s Trinity College at 6.30pm on Friday 27th March.

Abandoned archives: Stories we can’t tell will hear from author and journalist Fintan O’Toole, Justice John Hedigan who chairs the National Archives Advisory Council, Anne Dolan of Trinity’s history department, and Hazel Menton and Niamh McDonnell from Fórsa Archivist’s Branch. The event will be moderated by archivist and broadcaster Catriona Crowe.

The open forum will draw attention to the threats posed to Ireland’s national archives, which were highlighted in a Fórsa report last year, which described a service creaking under the pressure of staff and skills shortages, expanded responsibilities, new technologies, space constraints, and legislative shortcomings.

The event is supported by Fórsa, the Archives and Records Association, the Information and Records Management Society, the Irish Association of Professional Historians, the Irish Society for Archives, and the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.

Fórsa wants the next government to overhaul archive and record-management legislation to require public service bodies established since 1986 to maintain and transfer records to the National Archives.

As things stand, high-profile organisations like NAMA, the National Treasury Management Agency, the Garda Ombudsman, and Tusla, have no legal obligation to maintain and archive records for eventual release to the public.

The union also wants better physical infrastructure to store electronic records, and improved staffing and procedures across Government departments and offices to ensure that records are properly managed.

Fórsa official Sean Carabini, who will also speak at the event, praised the dedication and professionalism of National Archive staff.

“There are staffing gaps across all levels and grades, making it virtually impossible for the important work of the archives to be carried out. Without the dedication and professionalism of each and every member of staff, the place would have ceased to function a long time ago,” he said.

Register for the forum HERE.

Almost 42% of Irish households would be unable to meet an unexpected expense of €1,000, according to new research on in-work poverty from the union-supported Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI). This compares to an EU average of just 34%.

The think tank’s latest survey on income and living conditions found that well over 80% of single parents couldn’t afford an unexpected financial emergency should one arise. On this measure, Ireland ranked bottom in the EU, 6.4 points behind Bulgaria.

Unexpected expenses refer to emergency repairs, a family funeral, increased insurance costs, or any other unforeseeable expense.

The latest edition of the NERI survey, which links the employment to living standard indicators, focussed on deprivation rates and ability to afford unexpected expenses in order to highlight in-work poverty.

NERI says Ireland fares poorly compared to other EU countries, and that even the share of full-time workers with temporary or permanent contracts unable to meet an unexpected expense is on the rise.

A further study of deprivation rates also highlighted the in-work poverty faced by many employees.

It found that 31% of under-employed people – those who work part-time but want full-time work – suffered material deprivation, defined as the inability to afford two or more of 11 everyday things like a winter jacket, new furniture, or the occasional night out.

The survey showed that material deprivation for every category of worker, even full time staff with permanent contracts, was higher in 2017 than in the years leading up to the financial crisis.

Read the report HERE. 

Almost 40% of workers aged under 30 are in some kind of atypical working arrangement, according to research by the trade union-backed Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI).

The recent report, based on 2017 figures, found the norm for young workers was shifting towards part-time work – both temporary and permanent – as the share of full-time permanent jobs falls.

It also found an increased risk that part-time and temporary employment was becoming “more precarious” in recent years.

The report warns that headline figures for part-time and temporary employment, which show a return to normal levels in recent years, masks the true nature of precarious work for younger workers.

It says the share of permanent full-time jobs in new employment contracts has barely recovered following the financial crisis. Instead, higher shares of precarious employment in the labour market relative to the boom years are increasing financial insecurity and deprivation rates for younger workers.

The proportion of under-thirties in full-time permanent jobs fell from 75% in 2004 to 69% in 2008, and less than half of this ground had been recovered in five years of strong growth up to 2017.

Meanwhile, the share of people that are underemployed (part-time workers who would rather have a full-time job) is almost 50% higher than it was in 2007.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) was among a group of European trade unions that recently called for the ratification of a 2019 International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention on violence and harassment at work.

The ILO is a UN body made up of representatives of government, employers and unions.

It came as a UK survey revealed that over half of women workers in the UK, and 63% of young women aged 18-24, have experienced sexual harassment at work.

The poll, published by the TUC – the British equivalent of ICTU – also revealed that seven in ten women workers believe the #MeToo movement has led to more openness about sexual harassment.

But the framework to report and address workplace sexual harassment remains poor, according to the research from the union representative body.

The TUC called on its government to mandate employers to actively prevent sexual harassment in the workplace. It said this would shift the responsibility for dealing with the issue from individual victims to employers.

In a separate survey, three-fifths of respondents cited the fear of a negative impact on their career or working relationships as the main reason for not reporting workplace sexual harassment.

Fórsa official Geraldine O’Brien welcomed the European-wide union effort to establish a mechanism to hold employers responsible for preventing sexual harassment at work.

“Once imposed, legal obligations will reduce offences in the workspace and reduce the burden of responsibility on victims. The call for change is a positive first step, but there is a long way to go before the problem of sexual harassment at work is resolved,” she said.

Geraldine said Fórsa would closely monitor the Irish Government’s response to the legislative demands.

The full report outlining the survey results by the TUC can be found here. 

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, and the subsequent displacement of workers, demands that the benefits of greater technology-driven productivity are shared with workers. That was the message conveyed by Fórsa to Ireland’s top academic and commercial experts on AI at a recent seminar in Dublin.

The union’s communications officer Niall Shanahan told the seminar that unions wanted to ensure that the benefits of automation and technological development led to better working lives.

“This can be in the form of elimination of repetitive or dangerous tasks, or the reduction in working hours but with maintenance of pay, for example through a four-day week,” he said.

Niall said unions across Europe had called for greater dialogue, cooperation, and consultation when new technology is introduced into workplaces.

“There is a widespread agreement that contemporary innovations and development in automation, computing, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) poses at least the possibility of disruption and changes in labour markets and employment.

“These rapid developments have caused much anxiety among unions and others who are interested in labour markets as the prospect of mass unemployment precipitated by automation and computerisation seems evident. But this is not a new challenge for the trade union movement.

“It was a hot topic at the TUC Congress in 1956, where people were talking about a new “electronic computer” developed by the food manufacturer Lyons (Lyons Electronic Office, or ‘LEO’ for short). The computer could work out the payslips for 10,000 employees in four hours — a job that used to require 37 clerks.

“The TUC echoed the optimism of John Maynard Keyne’s belief that this technology could usher us forth toward a more prosperous leisure society: “Automation offers the prospect of higher pay, greater leisure, and healthier and less strenuous work,” but argued unions would need to make sure the benefits of greater productivity were shared with workers.

“In that latter sense, our concerns today remain much the same,” he said.

Analysis

Niall drew from Fórsa’s 2019 scoping report on automation by Craig Whelan, an analyst with the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and a Fórsa member, who developed the paper as part of his UCD Masters of Public Policy programme.

Craig’s analysis shows that academic studies since the turn of the millennium vary quite a bit on the extent to which whole jobs, as distinct from specific tasks, will be eliminated by evolving technology.

A 2018 study estimates that approximately half of jobs have a high likelihood of being at least affected by automation.

Of this, 14% are “highly automatable” with a probability of automation of greater than 70%.

Additionally, 32% of jobs have a risk of automation between 50% and 70%, pointing to the possibility of significant change in the way these jobs are carried out.

And while the academics dispute the extent of the risk of automation to labour markets, they tend to agree on trends. Workers with lower levels of education are the most at risk of automation and workers in the occupations estimated to have a higher automation risk are displaying a much higher unemployment rate. As recently as 2018 the OECD said that this particular trend is “already reflected in employment outcomes.”

An Irish study in 2018 estimated that approximately two out of five jobs in Ireland are likely to be impacted substantially by automation. Breaking this down on a sectoral basis, they find that transportation and storage, agriculture, forestry and fishing and the construction sectors have a probability of automation of greater than 50%.

They also find that women tend to be employed in occupations with a higher risk of automation than men.

Regulation

The publication of the European Commission's regulation for AI in Europe coincided with the seminar. Writing in Silicon Republic one of the organisers of the Dublin event, Professor Barry O’Sullivan from the Insight Research Centre in Cork, commented: “Ireland has a great opportunity to become a leader in trustworthy AI. Ireland is the European home to many of the world’s leading companies in data, AI and technology.

“There is significant national strength in the commercial, academic and civil society spheres. Trustworthy AI will become a commercial imperative.

“Ireland is a country that is respected and trusted throughout the world because of our reputation in areas such as safe food production, our environment, our tradition of international peace-keeping and diplomacy, as well as our achievements in arts and culture. We should establish a world-leading reputation for trustworthy AI. We have the ingredients, the expertise and the ecosystem to make it happen.”

Ireland’s economic recovery and rapid private sector investment growth has left the public sector lagging behind the rest of the economy, according to the employers’ body Ibec.

In a recent speech to a business leaders‘ conference, Ibec chief executive Danny McCoy business had become “too big, too fast for our society to cope with because the public realm has not scaled quickly enough.”

He said the ratio of private to public sector jobs was now 25 to 1, following the creation of 400,000 private sector jobs since 2014. He described this as a “dramatic imbalance,” and said the ratio of private to public jobs is now “out of kilter.”

Mr McCoy said the imbalance was creating surging demand for public infrastructure and public services, resulting in an intense public debate about housing, health and quality of life. This was reflected in the recent general election.

Fórsa general secretary Kevin Callinan commented: “In the depths of the economic crisis progressives argued that the problem wasn’t that the public sector was too big, rather the private sector was too small.

“Now, with a strong recovery in Ireland, it’s the growth - and the potential for further growth of the private sector - that’s highlighting the fact that the public sector is too small.”

McCoy said: “The key point is we have allowed parts of the public service to become proportionately too small for business and society to continue to thrive.”

He also emphasised the need for social dialogue on issues like public infrastructure, public services, carbon reduction targets and the effects of Brexit. He said Ibec and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had already had positive contacts on the issue.

“Ireland needs to build a new national consensus to help provide solutions to these challenges. A new social dialogue forum would consist of a range of stakeholders including business representative groups, trade unions, NGOs and other players in the civil society arena,” he said.

McCoy’s earlier call for a new social dialogue process last September was welcomed by Kevin Callinan, who said renewed social dialogue could resolve or improve issues including childcare, education and housing.

“The outgoing government’s approach to social dialogue sought to limit the opportunities for employers and unions to work with government to craft solutions to basic problems that affect workers but also impede the potential for business development. We need investment in transport, housing, education and training, and our public health system,” he said.