Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

This question is to discuss the employment-related issues concerning community employment, CE, schemes supervisors and assistant supervisors. There is an issue around pensions also and there are a range of issues which have cropped up over the years that have never been fully addressed. One of the main ones is that most CE supervisors' jobs are benchmarked in the wrong way and it is not a proper recognition of the qualifications that are required, the activities they are forced to undertake and the job specification.

I have a copy of the job specification here, which I believe it is slightly out of date. Very few job specifications, however, would have so many parts of it outlined with such specific requirements. I am surprised, therefore, that they manage to get anybody through the process of becoming a supervisor on that basis because they are expected to do so much. That may perhaps be because the CE supervisor is a role which captures quite a good deal, given the CE programme itself does so much. I am not criticising the scheme; that is a debate for another day. There is the need to repurpose it and, in some ways, to get the Department of Social Protection separated from it, because there is too much concentration on job progression and not on community support.

However, as I said, that is a different debate. Today's debate is about the supervisors themselves and the fact that they have had very limited, if any, increases in pay. They are dependent on the Government to set the rates of pay and to issue the funding through the Department of Social Protection to the sponsor organisation. Basically, the Government or the Department is the shadow employer, but we cannot negotiate with a shadow employer, as we would do otherwise. That is why the supervisors rely on me and sometimes the unions to go into the Labour Court. The problem is that they should not have to do that. There should be some type of negotiations to look after supervisors, some of whom are 20 years in the job, who are at the highest point of the increment scale. The scale has only four points and then a person is stuck, which makes supervisors feel devalued. An additional focus and workload is put on them. Those who are coming in at that level are now required to have a Bachelor of Arts degree or level 7 equivalent. Unlike in the past, there is no recognition of a change from a level 6 to level 7. There was not an increase in pay or recognition for that. Neither was there an increase for the additional work in terms of the bureaucratic work that is now associated with the job, albeit on computers. However, in the past supervisors did not have to fill out as many forms by hand.

A range of issues is associated with the fact that the job of a community employment supervisor is not permanent. If the number of participants in a scheme drops, which has happened in places around the country, it means the job of a supervisor can be endangered and there is no guarantee that he or she would be employed on an adjacent scheme, which could also be going through the same problem, or that there would be some other work available and the person will then be back on the scrapheap looking for another position as a supervisor or for something else.

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