You’re better off in IMPACT

IMPACT members are entitled to professional representation on pay and workplace issues. And you can save money through the wide range of financial benefits provided or negotiated by the union.

IMPACT members get:

• €5,000 personal accident insurance
• €5,000 critical illness or death benefit
• Spouses covered for death benefit too
• Free legal help in bodily injury cases
• Free 24/7 legal advice helpline
• Free 24/7 confidential counselling helpline
• Free 24/7 domestic assistance helpline.

Opt into savings on:

• Travel insurance
• Car insurance
• Home insurance
• Additional pension benefits, and
• Salary protection and life cover.

And apply for:

• Gaeltacht scholarships for your children
• Industrial relations scholarships
• Benevolent grants if you find yourself in financial distress.

IMPACT members and staff were shocked to hear of the tragic killing of Trevor O’Neill earlier this month. Trevor had been a member of IMPACT’s Municipal Employees’ branch since 1999 when he joined the drainage division of Dublin City Council. He worked in various sections, but spent the majority of his years working with the Tide Gate’s Crew out of Marrowbone Lane depot. He was promoted to assistant inspector three years ago.

A victim of mistaken identity, Trevor was shot dead while holidaying with his partner and three children in Majorca.

IMPACT’s Municipal Employees branch convener Thomas Murtagh expressed his shock and sadness at the news. “Members of the Municipal Employees’ branch are shocked at this terrible tragedy. Trevor was described as the life and soul of the Marrowbone Lane depot. His colleagues will miss him greatly. I would like to extend the branch’s condolences to Trevor’s partner Suzanne and their three children,” said Thomas.

IMPACT national secretary Peter Nolan said “I extend the deepest sympathy on behalf of the entire IMPACT community. Our thoughts are with Trevor’s family at this time difficult time.”

Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam dílis.

The lowest paid civil servants in Ireland, who start work on the lowest possible legal wage, have today (Monday) served notice of a work-to-rule at the Garda College in Templemore. Their union IMPACT says it may also take an equal pay case against the State because male staff doing similar work in other parts of the public service are paid significantly more than the female college cleaners in dispute.

The row is over a number of issues including management’s failure to hire enough staff to deal with increased student numbers as Templemore becomes fully operational. IMPACT has also raised health and safety concerns with management, and is seeking a formal Health and Safety Authority inspection of the facility.

IMPACT national secretary Andy Pike said: “Pay for college cleaning staff is the lowest in the civil service, with a starting salary at the national minimum wage, and well short of the recommended €11.50 living wage. Staff are also expected to carry out a wide range of extended housekeeping duties without receiving any additional reward.

 “There is now a two-week window for management to engage with IMPACT before staff start their work to rule, which will see cleaners revert solely to cleaning duties instead of working as housekeepers or hotel services staff.”

IMPACT has warned that revelations of irregular pay arrangements for top managers in charities and voluntary organisations could put funding, jobs and vital services at risk. Its official Ian McDonnell said hard-working and modestly-paid staff were concerned that long-term reputational damage was being done to the sector, which plays a unique and irreplaceable role in public service delivery.

Speaking earlier in the summer, Mr McDonnell said: “Staff in the charity and voluntary sector have worked tirelessly to maintain services as budgets, wages and staffing was cut, time and again, throughout the recession. They are appalled at the revelations about senior managers in certain organisations, including Saint John of Gods where top managers appear to have benefited from huge pension injections and a shady two-tiered payroll system.”

He said there was a danger that ordinary, dedicated staff would be tarred with the same brush. “The Government needs to send a clear message that most charity and voluntary sector staff – including most managers – are honest people, committed to the services they provide. The relevant Government departments must act quickly to stamp out unjustified and irregular payments to senior managers. They also need to give public assurances that State support for the sector will continue so that essential services continue to be funded and delivered,” he said.

IMPACT officials Eamonn Donnelly and Dessie Robinson presented Limerick-based suicide charity Living Links with a cheque for €7,125 during the summer. The money was raised by the IMPACT charity cycle from Limerick to the union’s May conference in Killarney.

The traditional charity cycle, supplemented by a 10km charity run this year, raised a total of €28,500. Suicide or Survive (SOS), Spun Out and Kerry Lifeline also received cheques for €7,125.

SOS founder Caroline McGuigan praised IMPACT for its support over the years. “Throughout the years, your support, belief and extreme generosity has allowed us to continue to deliver our innovative and life-changing programmes all over Ireland. Our Eden Programme has now expanded to Galway and Mayo, Our wellness workshops continue to reach thousands of people, our WRAP and supporters’ programmes are also expanding throughout the country, and we are now working in Wheatfield prison as well,” she said.

This is the fifth time Eamonn and Dessie have organised this event, and other IMPACT staff and members participated in this year’s 110km cycle. The conference-related events have raised a total of €110,000 for local and national charities.

“We could not have done this without the substantial help and participation of IMPACT branches, members and the union’s executive,” said Eamonn.

The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) has updated its website homepage  to incorporate some important new features that move the site towards a news platform model. One key feature is UnionNews.ie, which recently went live.

This is an entirely new service that displays news output and video from 19 different trade union sources, including IMPACT, in a single place. Sources include the major Irish unions and international federations like the European Trade Union Confederation and the International Trade Union Confederation.

The news content is grouped under ‘Ireland’ or ‘International’ and broken down by date, with the most recent news showing. News output is also organised according to individual affiliates. The aim is to make this the one stop, central location and reference for anyone seeking a quick update and overview of what unions are saying on major issues.

IMPACT’s newly-named Dublin North Health and Welfare branch is inviting its members and their families to launch the new name at a free action-packed family fun day on Saturday 17^th September.

Members of the former Dublin North HSE branch will be entertained with an array of inflatable games, archery, face painters, balloon modellers, and a DJ – and there’s a crèche for the little ones. Barbeque food will be served under a marquee and an ice cream van will be on site.

The job evaluation scheme for health service clerical, administrative and management staff opened last Thursday (1^st September) following IMPACT members’ huge endorsement of industrial action over the issue last month. The Department of Health sanctioned the reactivation of the scheme following intensive talks between the union and the HSE in the wake of the ballot.

Management has also accepted the union’s proposals on the method of filling posts upgraded on foot of job evaluations. And they have agreed to further talks on the union’s ambition to see the scheme extended to health professional posts and more senior management grades.

IMPACT national secretary Eamonn Donnelly said: “Through our ballot, clerical and admin staff have made it clear to management that they will not be treated as second-class citizens in our health service. It’s an important statement, and a significant victory that has achieved the objective of reopening the job evaluation scheme.”

On the filling of upgraded positions, it has been agreed that staff who have been in post for four years or more at the time of a job evaluation will stay in the position. Other upgraded posts will be filled by competition. IMPACT has already trained teams of assessors and the union believes that the first job evaluations could take place from October this year.

The union won agreement in principle to reopen the scheme – unilaterally abandoned by management at the height of the economic crash – during last year’s negotiations on the Lansdowne Road agreement. Management subsequently agreed to reinstate the scheme from June 2016, but then reneged on that deal. This provoked an IMPACT ballot that saw 87% of members back industrial action.

The scheme, which is open to clerical and administrative grades III to VI, and related grades, offers staff the prospect of an upgrading if their job roles and responsibilities are found to have increased sufficiently.

Its eight-year suspension led to a significant backlog of existing and potential applications from workers who have taken on substantial extra responsibilities as clerical and admin staff numbers fell dramatically during the crisis.

Job evaluation is an established tool that allows the knowledge, skill and responsibilities associated with individual jobs – rather than grades or staff categories – to be assessed and appropriately rewarded. While a job evaluation doesn’t guarantee an upgrading, many health staff believe their roles have grown considerably as they have taken on more responsibility over the years.

Read our ‘frequently asked questions’ document here.

According to 2013 research carried out for the giant catalogue retailer Argos, more than one in ten parents buy their children toys that they hope will encourage them down a specific career path. This research suggests that there is a direct link between the toys that children play with and the vocational skills and interests they acquire in early life.

The data backs this up: there is a quantifiable relationship between the type of play people remember enjoying as children and the kind of work they are engaged in as adults. Two-thirds of people working in maths-related roles, for example, reported having been interested in puzzle-type toys as kids.

It is in this context that toy manufacturers’ practice of targeting particular toys at girls and others at boys becomes problematic. In categorising toys by gender, manufacturers essentially define the types of vocational skills and interests appropriate for girls and for boys to engage with and acquire. This, in turn, implies that certain jobs are for boys and that others are for girls.

This division of the toy market along gender lines is something that has gained some focus in the recent past. An online discussion on the topic of toys and gender by a group of concerned parents gave rise to an advocacy campaign called Let Toys be Toys.

The campaign’s literature – as well as research it cites – argues that toys function as social texts that inculcate kids into traditional, hegemonic gendered discourses. Toys convey a society’s ideology. The ideology that they convey, it turns out, is, for the most part, a profoundly conservative narrative about traditional gender roles based on normative ideas about how heterosexual western men and women ought to interact.

The gender divide within the toy market can be neatly encapsulated by the contrasting figures of the action hero and the princess. The hero serves as the archetypal embodiment of the toy industry’s view of masculinity, while the image of the princess serves as a distillation of the industry’s ideas about femininity. In other words, the toy industry sees masculinity as being active and aggressive, and sees femininity as being passive and submissive. The princess locked in the tower waiting to be saved.

This crude hero-princess dynamic filters down through the entire toy industry, manifesting itself at every turn, sometimes in plain sight and sometimes in highly nuanced ways. The net result is that girls’ and boys’ toys take on distinct characteristics that correspond to toy manufacturers’ hegemonic worldview on gender.

Specifically, boys’ toys often tend to foster technical knowledge and competence that prepares them for a career in the industrial economy. Girls’ toys, meanwhile, place an emphasis on domesticity and nurturing and are designed to prepare girls for a life of homemaking. When girls’ toys do represent women at work, the women are almost invariably depicted in caring or service roles

In this context, the former Conservative UK junior education minister, Elizabeth Truss, has publicly warned that toy manufacturers risk turning girls off careers in maths and science unless they provide alternative play options for them.

Her fears are demonstrably well-founded: 82% of workers in caring, leisure and other services are female. Girls, meanwhile, are very much underrepresented in STEM subjects at school, meaning that they are more or less excluded from the supply pipeline that leads to lucrative positions in major tech companies.

Women are overrepresented in the lowest paid sectors of the workforce and this copper-fastens the gender pay gap in place. These recent insights into the toy industry and the manner in which young girls are groomed, however, would suggest that the choice, on the part of women, to enter the lowest-paid jobs is not an entirely free one.

Toys, then, are far from trivial. This is a matter of real importance with regard to women and their position in the workplace.

How far does this problem extend? Every winter Ireland’s national broadcaster, RTÉ, produces a special ‘Toy’ edition of the flagship Late Late Show. This programme is funded by the public through a license fee. In some years, the producers of the programme share a full list of toys featured on the show online. Part of this list is categorized as ‘boys’ and another part as ‘girls’. Given that the Late Late is such a staple of middle Ireland’s media diet, these lists are likely to reflect popular opinion as to what toys are suitable for boys and for girls.

From the point of view of a trade union, the greatest point of interest is around those toys that relate directly to particular careers or jobs. Does RTÉ’s Toy Show (implicitly or explicitly) suggest that certain jobs are appropriate for one gender rather than the other? Judge for yourself: 

2009 Toy Show List

Boys’ Toys that Feature Explicit Job / Vocational Mentions:

• Farmer Tractor and Trailer - Farmer
• Gaskett’s Garage - Mechanic
• Train Set Table - Train Driver
• Take Along Thomas - Train Controller
• Postman Pat and Van - Postman
• Paperplane Launcher - Pilot
• Electrical Crane - Engineer
• Remote Control Scania Truck - Truck Driver
• Heli Missions - Helicopter Pilot
• Mini Football Goals - Footballer
• Ferrari Remote Control - Racing Driver
• Gunship Tornado - Millitary
• Forensic Finger Kit - Detective
• Ben Ten Tattoo Studio - Tattoo Artist

Girls’ Toys that Feature Explicit Job / Vocational Mentions:

• Tattoo Writer - Tattoo Artist
• Thomas the Tank Engine Rocker - Train Controller
• Fireman Sam Truck - Firefighter
• Car Transporter - Logistics and Shipping
• Kids’ Drum Kit - Musician
• Hamley’s Vet Kit - Vet
• Hamley’s Cash Register - Shopkeeper

Many of  the Girls’ toys related to homemaking or child care:

• Annie Realistic Baby - Stay at home mother
• Princess Alexa Baby - Stay at home mother
• Lifelike Baby Expressions - Stay at home mother
• Baby Alive - Stay at home mother
• Fisher Price My Baby - Stay at home mother

2011 Toy Show List

Boys’ Toys that Feature Explicit Job / Vocational Mentions:

• Nano Block Eiffel Tower - Engineering
• PlayMobil Top Agents Camera and Monitor Set - Intelligence Agent
• Zube Dude Fireman - Firefighter
• Fold and Go Barn - Farmer
• Paper Jamz Pro Series Guitar - Musician
• Assortment of Farming Toys - Farmer
• Tommy 20 Blaster Gun - Military
• Hurley - Sports person

Girls’ Toys that Feature Explicit Job / Vocational Mentions:

• Energy Bar Maker - Cook

Many of  the Girls’ toys related to homemaking or child care:

• My Baby Alive - Stay at home mother
• Chou Chou Magic Pacifier - Stay at home mother
• Tinkerbell Teaset - Homemaker

2013 Toy Show List

Boys’ Toys that Feature Explicit Job / Vocational Mentions:

• Airfix Quick Build Typhoon - Military
• Airfix Quick Build Apache - Military
• Street Striker - Sport
• Gyro Buzz Motorbike - Driving
• Bruder John Deere - Farmer
• Bruder Round Baler - Farmer
• Playmobil Western Fort Brave - Rancher
• Western Hornby Train Set - Rail driver
• Hornby West Coast Highlander - Rail driver

Girls’ Toys that Feature Explicit Job / Vocational Mentions:

• Doc McStuffin’s Doctor play set - Doctor
• Lottie Lighthouse Keeper - Lighthouse Keeper
• Moxie Girl Magic Hair Salon - Hairdresser

IMPACT has insisted that future pay comparisons between the public and private sector must be based on a fair assessment of individual public service grades and comparable private sector workers, not “absurd crude averages” of pay across the two sectors.

In their submission to the Government’s consultation on the soon-to-be-established Public Service Pay Commission, IMPACT and other public service unions also warn that comparisons of lower-paid public servants with “deplorable practices in some parts of the private sector” would not be acceptable.

There is a great deal of disagreement over how public and private sector salaries should be compared. Many economists and commentators point to wide gaps between economy-wide public and private sector pay averages as “proof” that public servants earn too much. But these crude averages don’t take account of the skills, responsibilities or other features of jobs in different sectors.

The ICTU Public Services Committee submission sets out how public-private pay comparisons can be done most accurately and fairly, saying that they should:

• Be between public and private sector workers doing equivalent work or work of equivalent value
• Be between public servants at the middle of their pay scales and private sector staff on middle to higher earnings, and
• Be between public service grades and similar staff from a representative sample of large employers – similar to the size of most public service organisations.

Unions also insist that the Public Service Pay Commission (PSPC) must avoid importing widening private sector gaps between high and low paid staff into the public service. And it says comparisons with private sector staff on unjustifiably low pay and “deplorable practices in some parts of the private sector” are unacceptable.

The submission also calls on the PSPC to take proper account of huge changes in public service pensions since 2004. And it says factors like allowances and security of tenure also became far less relevant in the public service during the crisis.

Unions gave the Public Service Pay Commission (PSPC) initiative a guarded welcome when it was announced in July, saying it had the potential to assist in both the unwinding of the FEMPI legislation – which introduced pay cuts and pension levies during the crisis – and addressing other concerns like low entry pay in many public service jobs.

The ICTU submission echoes IMPACT’s concerns when addressing the composition of the body. It calls for a credible, independent chair with an in-depth knowledge of industrial relations, along with union and employer representatives and a third category from ‘academia and/or the financial world.”

Earlier in the summer, ICTU welcomed the Government’s assurance that the PSPC – due to be established later this year – will inform rather than replace pay negotiations between government and unions, and that any international comparisons of public service pay would “have due regard” to the cost of living in different countries. The latter is a significant safeguard because Ireland has one of the highest costs of living in the EU.

Read the ICTU Public Services Committee submission HERE.

Read our FAQ HERE.

Fathers are now entitled to paid paternity leave of two weeks. The new provisions apply to births or adoptions that took place after the 1st of September. The leave can be taken any time within six months of the birth or adoption, but you must provide four weeks’ written notice of intention to take the leave.

Your exact entitlement to pay during the leave depends on the precise terms of your contract. Employers are not legally obliged to pay employees on paternity leave, though some employees will qualify for paternity benefit from the Department of Social Protection.

For more information on how to apply see the Citizens’ Information Website. Or see the FAQ on the Department of Social Protection’s Website. 

IMPACT has accepted an invitation to attend a meeting with Oberstown youth detention centre management in the Workplace Relations Commission today (5th September). The meeting will seek to address outstanding issues in the ongoing industrial dispute over poor safety measures and assaults on the campus.

Notified industrial action, which was due to take place today, has been deferred.

Residential care workers and supervising staff took part in an eight-hour work stoppage at Oberstown last Monday (29^th August) and had also served notice of more stoppages due to take place on Monday 12^th and Monday 19^th September.

In advance of the industrial action, an emergency cover plan was agreed with management in order to ensure the safety and well-being of the detainees in their care.

An incident, in which a member of staff was assaulted and badly injured, took place during the work stoppage. Up to 12 workers voluntarily left the picket line immediately to respond to the incident. IMPACT members reported that this meant there were more staff on-site responding to the incident than there would be in the course of a normal working day.

The most recent official figures (supplied by the Department of Children and Youth Affairs) revealed over 100 violent incidents in Oberstown last year, almost half of which were classed as ‘critical’. Critical assaults and injuries necessitated a total of 3,005 employee sick days, involving 65 staff members.

The staff concerned work at three schools on the campus: Oberstown Boys School, Oberstown Girls School and Trinity House. Responsibility for the campus was transferred from the Department of Justice to the Department of Children and Youth Affairs in 2012. The Oberstown campus currently caters for 48 under-18s, including a mix of vulnerable young offenders and violent criminals with multiple convictions for serious offences.