More than 40,000 nurses will have their pay cut by 13.16 per cent from Friday week unless they call off their ongoing industrial action, health service employers warned last night.
Notice of the plan to deduct money from their wages from May 18th for engaging in a work to rule which is now in its sixth week has been sent to the two unions representing the nurses, the Irish Nurses' Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses' Association (PNA).
Under the work to rule the nurses are refusing to deal with non-essential phone calls or carry out clerical or IT duties.
The HSE says this action, apart from putting patients at risk, is costing it €2 million a week as it has to employ others on overtime to do the work.
The nursing unions said they were seeking legal advice on the decision. They will meet tomorrow to consider what to do next, but have already indicated nurses may stop doing overtime in protest at the move, which would cause major disruption.
Séamus Murphy, deputy general secretary of the PNA, said the decision of the Health Service Executive Employers' Agency (HSEEA) was a "sinister" development. "It's provocative in the extreme . . . it's they that have moved now to escalate this dispute," he said.
"We have referred the matter to our legal advisers. We believe what they are doing is ultra vires. Our view is that we are well within our contracts at the moment and that we are doing the jobs which we were contracted to do, which is nursing," he added.
The HSEEA, in its letter to the unions, said the refusal of nurses to carry out duties such as answering telephones constituted a breach of their contracts. "The HSE can no longer sustain a situation where large numbers of staff, who are not performing their designated duties, and are therefore breaching their contract of employment, continue to receive full pay," it said.
It added that it wanted confirmation by 5pm tomorrow that nurses were returning to their normal duties. Otherwise it would give each nurse seven days notice from Friday of its intention to cut their pay.
"A deduction of 13.16 per cent is considered appropriate having regard to commitments received from the INO/PNA as part of Sustaining Progress, in relation to co-operation with modernisation and change, embracing the use of technology, achieving value for money in healthcare delivery and co-operation with benchmarking," it said. It also reminded the INO and PNA that their members had already missed out on a 3 per cent pay rise in December and would miss out on another 2 per cent on June 1st as a result of not signing up to Towards 2016.
Dave Hughes, deputy general secretary of the INO, said the employers could not just take money out of people's wages. "There is a Payment of Wages Act which prevents you doing that. This has been attempted on a number of occasions in the past and on all occasions it has failed in the courts," he said. It had been attempted with bank staff and teachers and it failed, he added.
"We will respond appropriately . . . It will mark a serious escalation of the dispute . . . but we will not be calling an all out walk out," he said.
The Minister for Health Mary Harney said: "We can't on the one hand have people not performing their duties and on the other hand the HSE spending more money to pay others overtime to cover for those that are already paid to do the job."
The nurses have not been paid for their work stoppages up to now but have received full pay for their work to rule.