UNION REPS, EMPLOYEES and former staff members at RTÉ have told The Journal that there is a “feeling of separation” between the broadcaster’s top earners and ordinary workers, who have struggled to secure contracts, experienced missed payments during the Covid-19 pandemic and, for one group earlier this year, received hourly pay below minimum wage.
The Journal has learned about the issues in the wake of revelations from the broadcaster that Ryan Tubridy was paid hundreds of thousands more over the last six years than RTÉ disclosed.
At the beginning of this year, some workers were paid below the national minimum wage, The Journal can also reveal.
Runners – general production assistants – working for the national broadcaster were paid €10.50 per hour up until the beginning of March of this year.
The national minimum wage increased to €11.30 per hour on 1 January 2023.
The workers were on casual contracts which do not have minimum or maximum hours of work.
A meeting on the matter was held in March after a member of staff brought the issue to the attention of RTÉ’s human resources (HR) department.
At the meeting, a HR representative informed those involved that the lower pay had been an issue with RTÉ’s financial systems. The workers were then given a pay increase to €12.50 an hour, as well as their back pay, to resolve the matter.
A staff member within RTÉ who is familiar with the matter told The Journal: “That’s the first time that’s happened. I will say in the past, they did actually move [wages] up and sometimes beyond what it was before, but it was just a case of negligence I think in that regard.”
They said that there is a feeling of a separation between the broadcaster’s big earners and the rest of its staff.
It does oftentimes feel like there is a certain level of unfairness there, definitely.
They said that there can be difficulty trying to secure contracts, especially for those entering RTÉ for the first time.
People can often be juggling a number of casual contracts at the same time with different working hours, which can result in them working up to 50 hours a week, and it can be “a long time” before they can secure reliable income, they said.
They added that a lot of people who do “actual work” at RTÉ don’t feel appreciated for their efforts.
When asked about the issue of the group being paid below minimum wage for a number of months, RTÉ said it did not comment on or discuss individuals.
Over 2017 to 2022 and in the first three months of this year, RTÉ underreported Tubridy’s earnings by a cumulative total of €345,000.
Director General Dee Forbes was suspended by the RTÉ Board on Wednesday, while the chair of the Public Accounts Committee is seeking to have Forbes and the senior executive team of RTÉ in front of the committee next Thursday.
Speaking to The Journal, SIPTU organiser Martin Mannion said there has been a history of RTÉ dealing with its top talent separately and differently to the rest of the staff within the national broadcaster.
“Commitments have been given that that wouldn’t take place, but it obviously has. As the union who represent some of the lower paid workers within RTÉ, it sort of wrangles with them that once again, despite assurance then that this wouldn’t happen, it has happened,” he said.
“And when members are asked to take pay cuts or are being told they can’t be given pay increases due to the fact that RTÉ haven’t got money, it sort of rubs them up the wrong way that this constantly is happening.”
In 2018, an external report by law firm Eversheds Sutherland, commissioned by RTÉ, revealed that up to 157 RTÉ employees could have been wrongly classified as self-employed, meaning they lost out on employment benefits.
In 2021, Forbes told the Public Accounts Committee that some 81 freelance and self-employed contractors were offered staff positions following an analysis of the Eversheds report by the Revenue Commissioners.
During the same committee, RTÉ commercial financial controller Fiona O’Shea said that the State broadcaster has made an initial payment to the Revenue. RTÉ confirmed to The Journal yesterday that full payment has now been made to the Commissioners.
Mannion said that bogus self-employment “has always been one of the things in RTÉ that has been ongoing”.
“It just adds to the whole way that RTÉ management and the board of RTÉ let this continually happen. It’s a big problem and our members are really disgruntled and really annoyed about it constantly happening,” he said.
He said SIPTU workers had suspected that practices such as hidden payments to stars were ongoing at the broadcaster.
This is proving what they had always believed. There had always been a suspicion that actions like this was taking place by RTÉ. We couldn’t prove it, but we suspected and now the proof is there.
“We suspect it may be a bigger thing than just one person, but currently we can’t prove that.”
In a statement yesterday, staff who are members of the National Union of Journalists called for the announced independent inquiry to be broadened to examine “wider issues relating to remuneration, including pensions and perks”.
Stephen Daly worked for RTÉ for five years. He told The Journal that he began working as a freelancer and was working five days a week across radio and audio production, while also as a television weather presenter and a continuity announcer.
“It was all going fine. Everything was alright. It was during Covid then, that RTÉ missed several payments to me that I had to go chasing basically. I missed a mortgage payment as a result of those,” he said.
“I had to email my line manager, I had to email their line manager, accounts, payroll, HR, and say, ‘Listen, I haven’t been paid, where’s my money?’. And it was kind of just a case of ‘You’ll get in the next payroll’. You get paid every two weeks in RTÉ, so it was a month before we got paid.
“It wasn’t just limited to me. There were lots of people in that situation who had freelance roles who just weren’t getting paid at all for one reason or another, and we never really got a reason as to why we didn’t get paid.”
When asked about the issue of missed payments to freelancers, RTÉ said it did not comment on or discuss individuals.
It was around September 2020, after he had raised the issue of missed payments, that Daly realised that his contract had been changed unilaterally.
“I was taken off air and just moved into a production role fully with no explanation or no performance review,” he said.
“In RTÉ, you get generic grades. My grade was that I was a studio coordinator, which is a multi-faceted thing where you cover loads of different needs across the organisation, reporting to the weather and continuity manager, and then all of a sudden I just became a full time audio editor with no feedback, no information given, just – for want of a better word – completely shelved.
I’m not saying that it’s related, but you know, what are the chances?
Siptu’s Mannion said that one of the ways RTÉ attempts to save money is by “attacking member’s terms of conditions of employment”.
“That’s part of the problem of the disgruntlement of our members, is that that’s being fed on one hand – the members terms and conditions being attacked – yet on the other hand, we get information like this coming out Thursday that shows that money is around, but it’s just being used by some people in RTÉ to make sure that they look after top talent and our members are the ones who have – it would appear – to be penalised for that.
They’re constantly looking at how they can save money and part of that is looking at changing people’s rosters, allowances that people have, trying to remove promotional outlets off our members.
“The general terms and conditions that we’ve achieved over many years are being undermined and eroded on the basis that RTÉ need to save money and then on the other hand, they’re underwriting payments that they shouldn’t be.”
Daly described the “mismanagement of RTÉ” as “shocking”, adding that the situation has been “completely wrongly handled”.
“It’s just a bit wrong to be seeing that people were getting paid extra when they couldn’t even just give me the money that was owed to me.”
An emergency meeting between RTÉ and the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) was held yesterday after it was confirmed that Forbes had been suspended on Wednesday 21 June.
In a statement, the NUJ said the revelations about the payments to Tubridy “threaten to undermine the trust which is the cornerstone of our relationship with the Irish people”.
“Members are angry and dismayed at the failure of the Executive Board to address the grave concerns of staff and the decision by management to refuse all media interviews,” it read.
Emma O Kelly, chair of the NUJ’s Dublin Broadcasting Branch, said members spoke of how devastated, ashamed, betrayed and angered they are at the meeting.
“Our members have worked extremely hard to earn and maintain the trust of the Irish public. That trust is something we value and respect hugely,” O Kelly, who chaired the meeting, said.
“They are devastated to see the hard-earned goodwill of the public undermined as a result of this scandal. We will continue to do our jobs to the best of our ability, and that includes holding RTÉ to the same standards that the public expects of any publicly funded body.
“We demand that our viewers and listeners are treated with respect, and we want that respect extended also to staff at RTÉ.’”
Mannion said union members want swift and transparent action.
“One of the things that happened in the past is nothing appears to really happen from this. Our members and the people who work in RTÉ want to see action take place that shows that management can’t get away with this behaviour and the board can’t be seen to condone these actions.”
He said whoever was aware of the payments with Tubridy “need to be taken to task”.
“It needs to be done in a way that’s fair and they get due process, but also at the end of the day, that our members are aware that action has been taken and that the issue has been dealt with and the people who are responsible for this are held to account.”
Meanwhile, Ryan Tubridy has apologised to his RTÉ colleagues.
“At the centre of all of this is trust,” he said in a second statement since the issues were made public. “The trust of colleagues in RTE and the trust of a great many people who listen to my show. To them: I wholeheartedly apologise for my error of judgement.”
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