Ictu chief: New pay deal must address staffing issues
Irish Congress of Trade Unions general secretary Patricia King says gaps in the numbers in health or teaching will only be bridged by reducing childcare and housing costs.
Ms King told the Irish Examiner she wanted formal talks on a new pay deal for public sector workers to begin by April.
The Government and union leaders began discussions before Christmas on laying out a path to agree a successor to the Lansdowne Road Agreement, the current pay deal.
This followed a controversial new €50m pay deal accepted by gardaí in November.
Ms King, in an interview with this paper, laid out key demands for unions, which are being flagged with the Public Service Pay Commission, a body tasked with agreeing the groundwork for a new deal.
Lower pay for new entrants would have to be removed, she said. “Multiplicity of pay rates for the same job is not tenable, it’s unfair, it is unreasonable to expect people to work in those circumstances and it needs to be addressed.”
Teachers and gardaí have both expressed anger at having a two-tier payment system for employees.
The Ictu chief said public sector pay had taken cuts through the pension levy, hours were added to people’s workload and allowances abolished.
However, a key concern — in addition to pay restoration — is how to restore numbers in many sectors after the moratorium on hiring and an exodus of workers from sectors: “The moratorium on recruitment [that] was in place for about seven years, has had massive effect. It has lifted but what you had was a whole period of doing more with less.
“It’s a big problem and we have said to the commission, you cannot look at this without looking at [it] in the round. You need to address this issue of haemorrhage of skills and so on, whether it is doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, whatever it is.”
Ms King said this would “have to form” part of the successor to the Lansdowne agreement.
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