Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I raise the serious issue of medical scientists and their trade union, the Medical Laboratory Scientist Association's 21-year campaign to implement their pay parity claim, which was approved by the then Minister for Health in 2001. With no resolution in sight, the workers were forced to take strike action yesterday. I wish to put it on the record that in 61 years, the medical scientists have only ever had one other strike, which was in 1969. They are not a mad, radical group of workers dying to get out on to the streets. This was a last resort for them to make their point about what has been going on.

As a brief background, the Medical Laboratory Scientist Association's claim for parity with clinical biochemist colleagues dates to 2001, when an expert group report recommended pay parity between the grades. The then Minister for Health, who is now the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, signed off on that and the Department of Health accepted the findings at the time. The newly awarded pay parity was lost within months as a result of an inadvertent procedural error in the first public service benchmarking award in June 2002. Following the job evaluation process for laboratory aids in 2019, the starting salary for a laboratory aid, who requires a leaving certificate, became higher than the starting salary for a State registered medical scientist with a level 8 degree. In January 2020, against a backdrop of a severe and growing recruitment and retention crisis among medical scientists, the MLSA renewed its long-standing claim for parity of pay and career progression with clinical biochemists and sought engagement with the HSE and the Department of Health.

By way of a timeline of the negotiations, a meeting with the HSE in March 2020 was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic with talks eventually beginning in August 2020. These talks stalled on the commencement of negotiations on the public service pay deal, Building Momentum, in October 2020. In February 2021, the MLSA rejected the terms of Building Momentum, taking the view that they did not deal with the key employment issues in the sector. Further discussion on the career progression side of the claim commenced with the HSE and the Department of Health under the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC, in early 2021, but the employer side withdrew in April 2021, without reaching agreement. In November 2021, with no progress made on the parity claim, and in the context of an even more extreme recruitment and retention crisis, MLSA members voted 98% in favour of industrial action in pursuit of their claim.

Despite rejecting Building Momentum, the union has participated fully in sectoral bargaining talks on the Building Momentum public sector pay deal. However, following meaningful proposals from the MLSA, no satisfactory progress has been made or currently appears possible. Following several requests by the MLSA, the WRC conciliation on career progression recommenced in March 2022 but, again, the HSE and the Department of Health failed to commit to an agreement on the issue. I met a number of medical scientists in the audiovisual room on Tuesday after they came back from the WRC. They were asked to go back and they did so. Again, no agreement was put forward by the Department of Health or HSE.

I am disappointed that the Minister is not present and I know the Minister of State will give the reply he has been supplied with, but there is a real need for the Government to get the finger out and actually deal with the issues these workers are facing. It is a parity claim that the Department of Health has signed off on, and it should be dealt with immediately before the two-day strike next week.

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