LAST UPDATE | 9 Nov 2021

UNIONS HAVE LAUNCHED a campaign calling for a 3% pay increase for thousands of workers employed in the voluntary and community sector.

The campaign, entitled ‘Valuing Care/Recognising Work’, was launched by SIPTU, the INMO and Fórsa and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

Adrian Kane, SIPTU Public Administration and Community Sector, said these workers are “the glue that holds our society together”.

“The reality is that these essential community workers have not received a pay increase in over 12 years,” he said. “Most are precariously employed with little or no pension cover or sick pay. We need to find a fair way forward for the voluntary and community sector.”

Community development worker Roisin Ryder said the sector was “massively impacted” by cuts during the recession.

“I’m not too sure that the powers-that-be often recognise that people are the centre of our work,” she said. “If we don’t get funding for workers, we actually can’t manage.”

Ryder pointed out that while pay restoration has happened for the public sector, it has not happened for community workers at all.

“In the longrun, when you’re attracting people into this work, which is quite complex work and quite a skilled job, it can be very difficult when you cannot offer a pay scale, you cannot offer a pension, because the grant is the exact same every year and that’s been a real challenge,” she explained.

Just recently, which is absolutely brilliant, the HSE have recruited for a whole load of health promotion workers, but where are the health promotion workers coming from? The community sector.

So there’s been a kind of exodus from the community sector and they’re dead right because they’ll get pensions and they’ll get a good salary at the end of the day.”

Workers in the sector such as those in addiction services say that the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a substantial increase in demand for services provided by the sector, but no increase in the annual grant funding available to organisations that provide services. 

In a letter to the Taoiseach sent today, union leaders said that while the Government is the principal funder of the sector, it has consistently denied any responsibility for the terms and conditions of employment which exist within it:

The adoption of this position by successive administrations has led directly to a highly dysfunctional industrial relations environment where recommendations by the Labour Court and other Employment Law Bodies remain unimplemented because the relevant government department will not fund the employer to comply with same.

They have sought a meeting with the Taoiseach on the issues raised by the campaign.