‘Section 39’ health and social care staff set to get 1% pay rise

Staff working in State-funded bodies providing health and social care who experienced reductions in pay following the economic crash are to receive a 1 per cent pay rise next January. This would be backdated to October under proposals which have been put forward in talks with trade unions.

The workers in what are known as section 39 organisations would also receive a further 1 per cent increase in the middle of next year.

The proposals were put forward at talks between unions and health service management at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) on Tuesday.

Unions are to consider the proposals and further talks are to be held on October 2nd.

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Siptu health division organiser Paul Bell said the Government had accepted the principle of pay restoration for staff in section 39 organisations . He said the mechanics of how this would be applied to union members in the sector would be discussed at the next round of talks in early October.

The trade union Fórsa said the talks at the WRC were “constructive and positive”.

A planned strike by more than 5,000 workers in a number of section 39 organisations, which was scheduled to take place on Tuesday, had been deferred after the Government signalled last week that it would table new proposals on pay restoration.

Unions had argued that while staff in public-service bodies, who in some cases carried out similar roles, had seen the restoration of pay cuts applied during the austerity years, those working in Section 39 organisations had not.

Heated exchanges

In the Dáil, there were heated exchanges between the Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Micheál Martin, who accused Leo Varadkar of being “dishonest” about section 39 hospices, disability organisations and mental-health service organisation and of hanging them out to dry.

The Government had failed to restore pay to employees of these organisations and the Taoiseach “keeps shifting the goalposts”, Mr Martin added. “Fundamentally this is not an industrial relations issue but a funding issue. It is an issue of basic fairness and hospice and disability organisations have been short-changed,” he said.

Mr Martin accused the Taoiseach of engaging in “waffle and nonsense”, but Mr Varadkar said what the Fianna Fáil leader called waffle and nonsense “others would call facts”.

He stressed that the section 39 organisations were “not publicly-owned bodies”. “These are private organisations that receive grant funding from the Government to provide a particular public service.”

Mr Varadkar said it was not a straightforward issue “but it is one we want to resolve. We want to include some funding in the estimates for 2019 to provide for pay restoration for staff in these organisations.”

But he said this figure could not be calculated until they knew what was involved as some organisations had made pay restoration while others had not. Some organisations were completely compliant with public-sector pay policy and others were not.

The Taoiseach added that on average 75 per cent of funding came from the State but some may receive as little as €10,000 or €11,000.