SCHOOL SECRETARIES have voted in favour of industrial action in protest at pay cuts.
The trade union Impact said school secretaries had voted in favour of the action by 72 per cent to 28 per cent following the decision to introduce a 5 per cent pay cut from the beginning of the year.
Impact assistant general secretary Brendan McKay said the union’s divisional executive committee would now consider proposals “for the appropriate industrial action by the school secretaries as well as considering other means to achieving a reversal of the pay cut”.
Some informed sources said a full-scale strike seemed unlikely.
Mr McKay said the Department of Education had instructed schools and local vocational education committees to impose pay cuts, along the lines of those applied to public service staff last year, to about 17,000 personnel including school secretaries, caretakers and cleaners.
“This imposed a cut of 5 per cent of gross salary on those earning less than €30,000.”
Mr McKay said there was a two-tier system in place where school secretaries, employed before the implementation of the Programme for Economic and Social Progress (Pesp) in 1990, were paid directly by the department.
Those appointed after Pesp were paid from a grant to school boards, out of which other school expenses were paid, he said.
School secretaries employed after 1990 did not enjoy a standardised rate of pay, with some earning barely above the minimum wage.
“The employers had consistently blocked any attempts to link these workers’ rates of pay to the public service, but saw fit to establish a link in order to make a savage cut to their pay,” Mr McKay added. “Under the last social partnership agreement, we established a forum which sought to address the outstanding pay anomaly for these workers.
“The goal of the forum was to achieve an appropriately funded and common minimum rate of pay per hour, but the imposition of this most recent pay cut undermines the objective which the forum had set itself, while the collapse of social partnership meant the forum has not been able to complete its task,” he said.
“Meanwhile, these workers remain vulnerable. They are not employed under any other public service conditions, have no access to pension and do not enjoy the protections negotiated for public sector workers in the Croke Park agreement.”