Pauline Tully (Cavan-Monaghan, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

In the early hours of Tuesday, 17 October 2023, unions reached an agreement on pay parity for section 39, section 56 and section 10 workers who are employed in community services. The agreement came about on foot of a long-running dispute relating to the pay they were receiving and the pay their counterparts directly employed by the State were receiving. A proposal was agreed acknowledging that the workers in those sections deserve pay equality. That was a very significant step for those organisations. A pathway was set out whereby an increase of 3% backdated to 1 April 2023 would be paid before the end of the year, with an increase of 2% from 1 November and an increase of 3% from 1 March 2024. That would come to a pay increase of 8% to those workers within 12 months.

That pay agreement has not been honoured. Of the 3% pay backdated to April, only 80% has been paid to date. I am less concerned about that because that is backdated pay and can be addressed. The increase due on 1 March was not paid on that date. A successor to Building Momentum was agreed with public sector workers since then, and they received a pay increase on 1 January, which means that the pay disparity between the section 39, section 10 and section 56 organisations and their public sector counterparts has widened again. This is causing huge concern within organisations, specifically those providing community services to disabled people.

For example, in my locality, the Irish Wheelchair Association in Cavan has had to reduce its service to an outreach service, consistent with what it offered during Covid times. It is holding Zoom meetings and maybe a limited community contact day once every couple of weeks for service users. It is also carrying out home visits. The staff in the service are excellent. They are doing absolutely everything they can to ensure that the service users get as much contact as possible, but it will not address the needs of those service users. They are so disappointed. The service had been reduced in recent years due to the lack of staff but now it has gone to zero service days. It is not the only organisation faced with this. It may have come to that crunch point at this stage, and it is to be hoped it can be addressed very quickly. It is engaging with the HSE, and we hope there will be meetings to try to address the staffing issue. Other organisations are in similar situations in that they may not quite have got to that point yet but they are very close to it.

There may be a number of reasons for this, but the main one relates to the pay disparity.

I am aware there is a recruitment crisis within the social and healthcare sector as it is, but if there are organisations that can pay, at the basic level, €4 to €5 per hour more than the HSE or section 38 organisations, employees will go to them. You could not blame them. We have a cost-of-living crisis and the employees have high rents or mortgages, so they will take the option.

The IWA in Cavan stated it recruits and trains people to an exemplary standard over six months but that they leave afterwards and go to organisations where they get a higher rate of pay. It also stated the strike and the action that preceded it highlighted the pay disparity. Many workers who had been very happy in their work and wanted to stay felt they had no option but to go elsewhere to secure more pay because of the pressures owing to the cost of living, rental or mortgages.

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