ASTI teachers have lodged a claim which accuses the Minister for Education, Mr Dempsey, of illegally docking their wages.
The claim has been lodged with a rights commissioner attached to the Labour Relations Commission. About 63 ASTI teachers - including the president, Mr Pat Cahill - submitted the claim yesterday.
The teachers claim they are due a 9.1 per cent increase and it was not included in pay packets in early January. They claim this was an illegal deduction and contravenes the 1991 Payment of Wages Act. While the union has said it will "take whatever action is necessary", any industrial action is highly unlikely. ASTI, along with other unions, signed up to a no-strike clause as part of Sustaining Progress.
Mr Christy Maginn, a member of the ASTI's standing committee, said he was confident the teachers would win the case.
He said ASTI members had not been given a reason why the Minister was withholding the pay increase, as agreed in Sustaining Progress. He said €6 million in wages should have been paid in early January. For individual teachers this represented between €120 and €150 a fortnight.
The ASTI union said: "Teachers have delivered all that was required of them in the timescale required, as has been attested by the performance-verification group. Members are now owed this money since January 1st and it is entirely unacceptable that this money has not been paid."
The Department of Education is currently in dispute with the teacher unions over parent-teacher meetings and the standardisation of the school year. Until these issues are resolved in arbitration, the Department has decided not to pay the increase.
Meanwhile, the ASTI has played down suggestions that it is planning a fresh pay campaign. Several motions to its annual conference have been circulated, but a spokeswoman said these were not union policy. She said the final agenda for the union's conference had not been drawn up.
The motions from local branches call for the Government to take a range of actions including: paying teachers similar salaries to third-level lecturers and and giving teachers a 17 per cent rise.