School secretaries: Talks could resume if McHugh offers new pay deal

School secretaries have signalled they would be prepared to re-enter talks with the Government to resolve the current dispute over pay if the Minister for Education was willing to adopt a more flexible position and look at a new remuneration model.

About 1,000 school secretaries staged a one-day strike on Friday and are set to resume a work-to-rule from next week.

The trade union Fórsa,which represents the school secretaries, said on Friday that it would be prepared to go back to Workplace Relations Commission (WRC)-brokered talks, if the Government demonstrated that it was willing to move away from "its rigid commitment to a 40-year-old two-tier pay system".

The union said Minister for Education and Science Joe McHugh had, in radio interview on Friday, asked Fórsa to go back to the WRC, and implied that there would be a new flexibility from his department and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform (DPER) if talks were to resume.

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The union called on the Minister and his officials “to confirm the Government’s willingness to discuss an entirely new pay structure to replace the existing two-tier system”.

The union said that, under the existing two-tier pay system, most school secretaries earned just €12,500 a year, with irregular, short-term contracts that forced them to sign on during the summer holidays and other school breaks.

The union said that, while a minority of school secretaries were directly employed by the Department of Education and had public service employment status, the majority had their pay and conditions determined by school management boards.

Clerical officer scale

Andy Pike, the head of Fórsa's education division, said the union would go back to the WRC if the Government side was prepared to negotiate a new pay model to end the two-tier system, and signalled a willingness to use the existing Department of Education clerical officer pay scale as the starting point for this.

He also insisted that, under new reforms agreed, school secretaries would no longer be laid off at the end of each school term, and that basic employment rights such as paid holidays and sick leave should be introduced.

Mr Pike said: “In his media statement yesterday, and in a radio interview today, Minister McHugh seemed to suggest that the Government would move off its rigid position if we were to re-engage at the WRC. While this has not been our experience during the talks that took place between October and December, we are prepared to re-engage on this basis, if only to see if there is any real movement on the Government side.

“I hope that Minister McHugh, his officials, and his Government colleagues will note the solid determination that school secretaries have shown on Friday and throughout this campaign – as well as the incredible levels of support and respect they have earned from parents, school colleagues and management, and the wider public. He should be in no doubt that there will be a swift return to industrial action if it turns out that his comments yesterday and today were not made in good faith.”