MORE THAN 9,000 clerical and administrative staff in local authorities and health boards are expected to have voted to accept a new pay offer under the Programme for Competitiveness and Work, when the ballot boxes are opened.
Another 6,000 staff will automatically benefit from the increases, which are worth between 6.8 per cent and 24 per cent over the next five years.
If the vote is for acceptance, this will be the largest group of public sector workers so far to finalise a pay agreement under the PCW. As such it will provide renewed impetus for the a successor agreement, which are the discussed at a special delegate conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions tomorrow.
Their union, Impact, has made settlement of major outstanding pay claims under the PCW a prerequisite to talks on a successor.
Meanwhile, the Nursing Alliance is expected to finalise the latest restructuring deal for its members with management representatives today. Pay elements of the package are already agreed and details of the increases are being sent out by the unions to the State's 26,000 public sector nurses.
The alliance, which comprises the Irish Nurses Organisation Impact, SIPTU and the Psychic Nurses Association, is expected to issue a statement later today urging members to accept the pay terms. These add £11 million to the offer rejected by nurses in May, bringing the overall cost of the package to £50 million.
There are still some groups of nurses likely to be dissatisfied with the deal, including those in management grades, nurse tutors and senior public health nurses. However, these only comprise 700 of the total.
There will also be disappointment across all the grades at the failure of the independent adjudication board to make any significant improvements in the early retirement package. The board has offered 100 extra early retirement places, on top of the 600 already available, for nurses aged 57 with 35 years service.
The early retirement issue is to be referred to the Government pensions commission. It remains to be seen if the 100 extra retirement places will be accepted as a gesture of good faith or rejected as derisory.
The board has addressed a number of other major grievances. Ward sisters will have phased pay increases originally due in 2003 brought forward for implementation from June 1996.
About 4,000 nurses in supervisory grades will benefit, bringing, their basic salaries up from £19,727 a year to £23,520. Many will also earn substantial overtime, worth an average of £3,000.
The adjudication board has also found in favour of the nursing unions on the issue of linking public health nurse superintendents to the director of nursing grade. As expected, the board ruled against the phasing out of specialist allowances for nurses, which are worth about £300 a year.
It has also deferred the introduction of a new lower starting salary for nurses from 1998 to 2000.
This means that all student nurses already in the system will be able to join the profession at the bottom of the existing scale. Under the old offer, they would have had to start work earning "£1,000 a year less than existing staff and it would have taken them an extra two years to reach the top of the new staff nurse scale.
The group most likely to be disappointed with the adjudication are the assistant matron grades, who will find that in many instances they will be earning substantially less than the ward sisters who report to them. Unlike other groups who receive no increases, there appears to be no provision for their case to be reviewed under the adjudication terms.