POST PRIMARY TEACHERS will be balloted on whether to take industrial action as part of a “pay discrimination” campaign next month.

The Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) will ballot its 18,000 members from mid-September to early October on whether to renew its industrial action mandate.

TUI members first voted to give the union a mandate for strike action in September 2017.

The union’s president Seamus Lahart said progress has been made in its campaign to end pay discrimination but the process has yet to be completed.

Lahart said that big pay differences still occur, in the early years of employment, between those hired before and after 2011.

New secondary school teachers earn 10% less in the first 10 years of their career than they would have before the recession-era cutbacks were implemented.

“This two-tier pay regime is a cynical, damaging, discrimination, resulting in situations where colleagues are paid at different rates for carrying out the same work,” he said.

We are not looking for preferential treatment for these teachers – we are simply looking for all teachers to be treated equally.

“Needless to say, they are fully supported by longer-serving colleagues in this campaign for justice and equity, which remains TUI’s key priority.”

The union is now calling for the elimination of the remaining differences in the early points of scale, payment of the HDip and Professional Master of Education allowance for those who started teaching since 2012 and commencement of recognition of the six-year unpaid training period.