Mr. Colm Kelly:

The TUI notes that the Department of Education and Skills and Education and Training Boards Ireland deploy the 'tutor grade', an undefined grade and an excuse for poorly paying teachers. Tutors in our membership are offered no mutuality of obligation; they have little predictability about the scheduling or number of hours they will be required to work in any given week; they have uncertainty about their income which has consequences for their capacity to access financial credit; they have difficulty in managing work and family life and generally have poorer terms and conditions than those who work full-time hours. The effect is a zero-hour contract, where there is no ongoing confidence for the employee that work will be made available to them. The TUI is of the view that this form of employment should be legally prohibited.

The TUI is currently engaged with the Department of Education and Skills, further to a provision of the Haddington Road and Lansdowne Road Agreements, on the issue of the tutor grade and the failure of the Department to formulate a universally applied method to implement the Fixed Term Work Act 2003, for this cohort and issue contracts of indefinite duration, CID, to the grade. While those discussions are ongoing, the status quois the award of a year averaging contract, a commitment to supply a certain number of hours to each teacher per annum, rather than per week or month. Such annualised CIDs of hours have been given to hundreds of our members. The work, however, is unevenly spread throughout the year. The union continues to insist that hours must be assigned in a manner that facilitates a regular, and living, wage. The so called "flexible" manner of employment sought by employers does little to guarantee a standard of living for either our members or their families.

In many Education and Training Board, ETB training centres, former employees of FÁS, who are deemed instructors or trainers, are working zero hour contracts. They deliver courses, train, upskill and teach on demand. They may receive only a few hours of work per week or they may be deployed up to, and exceeding, 37 hours per week. They find it difficult to take holidays and feel pressurised into accepting work offered, regardless of the logistics of organising their lives around such work, because they will not get paid if there is not enough work available in other weeks. Some of these people have been working like this for several years; the TUI is aware of cases where members have been working for nine years or more on a zero-hour contract.

Our position is that all members have a basic human right to a standard of living and a wage to facilitate that standard of living. This can only be achieved through ensuring that permanent whole-time work is an achievable short-term goal for our members. The TUI is therefore seeking changes to legislation that would provide for the following: a right in law to a guaranteed minimum number of working hours and a legal prohibition on zero-hour contracts; a right to be paid compensation, when no work is made available; an amendment to the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 to require an employer to provide a written statement of terms and conditions of employment, including working hours, from day one of employment; the right to claim an alteration to the contract of employment in respect of working hours if over a specified reference period, their actual working hours were more than their contracted hours, as provided for in the Banded Hours Contract Bill 2016; a requirement for employers to advise all part-time staff of available hours and, in the case of hours that are likely to be required on an ongoing basis, the right for employees to claim such hours in advance of the employer advertising a vacancy; a structure for ensuring that part-time hours are assigned in a manner that does not preclude workers from engaging in other work to supplement their part-time income.