PAY CUTS:CARETAKERS AND school secretaries – who are among the lowest paid workers in the education sector – are to have their salaries cut.
The Department of Education yesterday issued a circular to all schools and VECs instructing them to impose pay cuts on up to 17,000 low-paid staff from January.
The workers affected are employed by individual schools and VECs. They are not on the department’s payroll but are indirectly funded through grants from the department.
They include school secretaries, caretakers, cleaners, administrative staff, school-completion programme staff and any staff employed directly by a recognised school or VEC.
The department has instructed employers to impose a pay cut on the same scales applied to public servants in last year’s budget. This imposed a cut of 5 per cent of gross salary on those earning less than €30,000.
Impact trade union, which represents many of the workers involved, says it will challenge the pay cut.
Deputy general secretary Kevin Callinan said: “This pay cut is thoughtless and ridiculously harsh. Most of these workers, school secretaries in particular, have waited for years to have their terms and conditions of employment standardised.
“In the worst cases we have found some were earning less than the minimum wage, and many never had the chance to earn much more than that.”
Mr Callinan said that a two-tier system currently existed where some school secretaries, employed before the implementation of the Programme for Economic and Social Progress in 1990, are paid directly by the Department of Education.
Those employed after that programme are paid from a grant given to the school boards, out of which other school expenses are paid.
Consequently, those school secretaries employed after 1990 do 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 now they seek to link it by way of a savage cut. Under the last social partnership agreement, we established a forum which sought to address the outstanding pay anomaly for these workers,” Mr Callinan added.
“That process had stalled in the wake of the collapse of social partnership, and now the Government has come after 17,000 of the lowest paid workers in the State with a view to inflicting even more pain.”
Seán Cottrell of the Irish Primary Principals Network said it was “beyond belief” that schools would be directed to cut the pay of secretaries and caretakers given that they play a pivotal role in the functioning of schools.
“Schools cannot operate safely without secretaries and caretakers. Cutting their pay will mean hitting the lowest paid workers in education.”
In a further development, the Department of Education has introduced a freeze on filling vacant permanent teaching posts in schools. It has instructed school managers to fill any permanent vacancies only on a temporary basis.
It says this is so that it can adhere to the provisions of the Government’s four-year National Recovery Plan. The plan includes the withdrawal of 1,200 teaching posts across the system.
These include resource and visiting teachers for Travellers, as well as some English language support teachers.
The freeze has been introduced so that teachers in those positions can be redeployed to fill existing vacancies. It does not affect vacant school principal and deputy principal posts.
The Teachers Union of Ireland has expressed its outrage.
Its general secretary, Peter MacMenamin, said: “The department seems hell-bent on disenfranchising the country’s best and brightest young teachers by a range of swingeing measures, including salary cuts, pension cuts and now this block on any permanent appointments.”
