Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The Minister is new in the job at the Department and I ask him to intervene on behalf of lecturers in the British and Irish Modern Music, BIMM, institute. Four of those lecturers are here in the Public Gallery. They were all on the picket lines earlier. I was with them today on Thomas Street. They have been forced to take strike action and mount protests because of absolutely shameful treatment by BIMM. This is a private company but 500, or 80%, of its students are effectively students of the Technological University of Dublin, TUD. This institution is funded to provide this course in commercial modern music. The students apply through the CAO to TUD. Their degrees are ratified - I am sure that is not the right word - by TUD. The degrees are awarded by TUD. TUD has outsourced this degree course to BIMM but these 53 workers have been treated shamefully. Many of them have been working there for a decade or more and they have been told to reapply for their own jobs. There are still as many students and the work is still there but BIMM has decided to tell the workers to reapply for their own jobs and has proposed that most of them would become freelance, when they were previously employed and on conditions that are about 50% of what they were previously employed under. Some of them would be given a "yellow pack" grade of lectureship at about 50% of what they were paid before. This is a disgraceful way to treat these people who are delivering an important course in music. We are asking for an intervention with TUD to end the shameful treatment of these workers.

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