Community organisation workers prepare for strike over pay differential with State sector

A strike scheduled for Tuesday by some 5,000 carers, personal assistants and health professionals looks set to go ahead, leaving vulnerable care recipients without vital services. Employed by 17 community and voluntary organisations, the workers are calling for pay parity with State-employed colleagues doing similar work.

After Minister for Disability Roderic O’Gorman told the Dáil on Thursday “unions have made it very clear that a meaningful offer is what is required and this is what is being worked on across the Government”, there seemed to be the prospect of talks being called on Friday. The day passed, however, with no real progress.

Those set to be on the receiving end are service users like Eileen Gormley, a 48-year-old living in Galway who receives daily support from a personal assistant employed by the Irish Wheelchair Association (IWA). Ms Gormley has muscular dystrophy, osteoporosis and is visually impaired. A personal assistant from the IWA comes for an hour and half each weekday, four hours on a Saturday and for a period on a Sunday. She also attends one of the organisation’s centres one day a week.

“Every morning my PA helps me to get up, have a shower, get myself dressed and sets me up for the day,” she says. “Without her I could get out of my bed but my muscles are very weak and it would be a struggle. I could dress myself but there would the fear of having a fall. If I don’t have someone to guide me, if I don’t have anyone, I wouldn’t be able to look after myself completely.

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“I wouldn’t be able to have a shower. If I had a letter, because I’m visually impaired, I wouldn’t have anyone to read it for me. I’d probably have to fork out for a takeaway and if I wanted to go to town I could probably get there but the taxi would just drop me there, I’d have nobody to help me get around.

“So for me this is an absolutely essential service and the thought of being without it is really stressful. I really value the whatever independence I do have but having her come is very important to me and I’d say some of my peers need their PAs even more than I do.”

Ms Gormley says she was “really grateful” for the increases she received to her income in the budget but she says “the carers deserve their increases too, I think they are being treated with disrespect”.

Gina O’Donohoe is one of the IWA carers. She has been with the organisation for 17½ years and visits a group of regular clients across Monaghan, Cavan, Louth, Meath and north Dublin.

The basic pay for a PA with the organisation is €15.82 per hour compared with €20.02 for someone doing the same work while directly employed by the HSE.

Ms O’Donohoe works around 30 hours a week and so would be about €120 a week or around €6,000 a year better off by securing similar work for a State agency. This is what a great many workers in the sector seek to do, the various employers affected by the planned industrial action say, leading to major problems with retention.

“I love the work,” says Ms O’Donohoe. “It can be anything…from getting somebody up in the morning to assisting them with dressing, toileting, personal grooming, getting them breakfast and assisting them to eat as well. Some of the people are very dependent and I administer medicines, making sure they take the right tablets, do shopping, housework, whatever is needed generally. It can be hard but I leave the people knowing that I have given them 100 per cent and that they are in a better place than when I went in. Better able to face the day.”

She does this, she says, for the same money she was paid when she started the job back before the financial crash. “And I only get paid for the hours I work. If one of my clients goes into hospital or goes on holidays I don’t get paid for those hours. I could walk into Lidl now and get paid more for stacking shelves but instead I’m working hard to help people who might well be in a nursing home if it wasn’t for the support that people like me provide to them.”

The concern many feel over what will happen if the strike goes ahead has, she says, been entirely clear over the past week or so. “But we don’t want to be striking. We are devastated. The people who are going into a job like this care about them and we are going into them at the moment and they are crying because we’re going on strike. ‘What am I going to do? How will I get up?’

It is understood that officials at the Departments of Health and Social Protection indicated the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform would be required to move on the matter. Yet unions representing the workers – Fórsa, Siptu and the INMO – and organisations employing them have all suggested that no intervention is anticipated before Monday and the current expectation is that the strike will go ahead as planned.