That is very acceptable. I thank the committee for its kind invitation to address it regarding the serious inequalities in the pay and conditions of employment for school secretaries and caretakers in primary and post-primary schools throughout the country. We welcome this opportunity to speak about the joint campaign initiated by IMPACT and SIPTU to achieve standardised rates of pay and conditions of employment for our members.
We take a great deal of pride in Ireland's education system. At its best, it has a world class reputation and has produced generations of educated citizens whose skill and experience have contributed much to our society and economy. Underpinning that system is a collaborative environment that brings together teachers, pupils, parents and school principals in a collective effort to achieve the best possible standards of education. School secretaries and caretakers are the skilled group of dedicated workers at the heart of this collaboration who apply themselves to achieving the potential of every school despite the mounting challenges faced by our education system and the growing problem of scarce resources.
School secretaries are highly skilled administrators. They are the first people one meets on entering any school and they provide the links between teachers and pupils and between schools and parents and the wider community. They are multi-skilled and are called upon to take on a wide range of roles, yet they do not have access to the most basic pay and conditions of employment.
School secretaries have a key role in communicating with parents and the community about what is happening in their schools, and are key to all essential information about their schools. This makes them an excellent source of information for parents, staff and students alike. School secretaries also take on social duties, from arranging school trips to playing a central role in fundraising activities. Every survey conducted in schools has acknowledged that our schools would not function without secretaries. It is a role that requires the utmost of discretion because of its highly sensitive nature.
School caretakers are equally pivotal to the smooth running of schools. Their skills and dedication ensure that teachers and pupils can work in an environment of comfort and safety. They are called upon to perform tasks as diverse as painting, plumbing, electrical and boiler maintenance and grounds keeping, which in any other enterprise would require additional staff or multiple service contracts. Caretakers ensure that school utilities are run effectively and efficiently, thereby helping schools to save money and reducing the burden on the State. Despite this, they do not have access to the most basic pay and conditions of employment and, in common with school secretaries, their job security, promotional prospects and pay levels remain inconsistent across the country.
Many school secretaries and caretakers are directly affected by the problem of resource scarcity because they are employed by their schools' boards of management on varying terms and conditions. Their salaries are paid from the ancillary services grants given to schools, out of which other school expenses must also be paid. These grants must accommodate inflation in an environment where increasing numbers of schools are going into the red at the beginning of the school year. Consequently, terms and conditions of employment vary so widely across the country that serious anomalies and inequalities have emerged which breach national labour laws and agreements. SIPTU and IMPACT have great respect for the work done by boards of management, which are filled on a voluntary basis by members of the community.
As members may be aware, a two-tier system exists whereby school secretaries and caretakers employed before the implementation of the Programme for Economic and Social Progress in 1990 are paid directly by the Department of Education and Science under the 1978 and 1979 schemes. The 1978 scheme applies to school secretaries and the 1979 scheme to school caretakers. Those employed after the PESP are paid out of the ancillary services grants given to school boards. Consequently, school secretaries and caretakers employed after 1990 do not enjoy a standardised rate of pay, with some earning barely above the minimum wage. We are aware of school secretaries and caretakers around the country who are earning less than the minimum wage and will give examples later. The continuing problem of school under-funding is certain to make such pay anomalies more commonplace.
In community and comprehensive schools, secretaries are employed via the 1978 or 1979 scheme and enjoy rates of pay at the agreed clerical and administrative grade 3 and grade 4 level. Despite this, and their increasing responsibilities, they cannot gain access to promotional opportunities that would allow them to achieve a far higher administrative grading elsewhere in the public service. Instead, their promotional opportunities are capped at clerical officer grade 4 level. If they were in VECs many of these secretaries would be at grade 6 or grade 7 level, such is the high level of work they do.
In primary and secondary schools no standards apply to rates of pay. Rates of pay differ greatly from one school to another, and very few schools apply national pay awards, cost of living increases or annual incremental increases. We know of school secretaries and caretakers who have not had a pay increase since 2000. That is not untypical. There was a recent media report of a school secretary in Limerick who is still earning €6 per hour or €225 for a 37.5 hour net working week after eight years of full time employment. That is less than the minimum wage and inflation has devalued that income over time.
It is not unusual for school secretaries and caretakers, particularly in rural areas, to work for more than one school. We have documented evidence of a school secretary earning €10 per hour in one school and €7.70 per hour in another just a few miles away. Another school secretary with more than ten years' service works for €8.60 an hour, while another, with more than ten years' service, is paid just €10 per hour. For this €10 per hour this secretary performs a wide range of duties including caretaking, cleaning and special needs assistant duties in addition to secretarial duties. These examples represent just some of the inequalities that appear to have flourished under the system of funding schools through the ancillary services grant and are common throughout the country, particularly in rural areas.
Caretakers are subjected to similar inequalities in their rates of pay. For example we know of one caretaker with 12 years' service, who has not had a pay increase since he commenced employment in 1996 and is still earning €302 per week or €7.55 per hour for a working week of 40 hours, which is well below the legal minimum wage. We know of another caretaker with 17 years' service earning just €8.22 per hour, which is also below the legal minimum wage and this worker has not had access to any form of a pay increase in more than five years. Caretakers working in community and comprehensive schools covered by the 1978 scheme earn a minimum hourly rate of €14.98, which does not include the recent 2.5% national wage increase due since 1 March 2008.
Caretakers also attend to after hours emergencies, responding to break-ins or alarm outages. However we have found that 66% of caretakers receive no call out rates or after hours premium payments. A further 9% of caretakers received only a flat hourly rate payment or flat time off in lieu of payment. The remaining caretakers receive payments ranging from €6 to €40 per incident, the latter being an isolated case.
Caretakers employed under the 1979 scheme in community and comprehensive schools attending call outs attract a minimum payment of three hours' overtime at a rate of time and a half per hour. Call outs at weekends attract double time premium payments and these caretakers also receive overtime payments and shift premiums for working extended opening hours. Caretakers employed under the 1990 PESP scheme provide similar extended opening hours services, however they receive no shift or premium payments.
Both IMPACT and SIPTU carried out research over the past 12 months, or a little longer in SIPTU's case. They found that secretaries, regardless of service, earned on average between €10 and €13 per hour. To put this in perspective, a secretary under the 1978 or 1979 scheme with one year's service has a starting pay rate of €12.85 per hour; with seven years' service, €17.01 per hour and with 15 years' service, the maximum is €20.76 per hour. These figures do not include the 2.5% national wage increase.
The research also showed caretakers employed by boards of management under the terms of the 1990 PESP scheme earn between €8 and €12.50 per hour regardless of their years of service and these workers do not have access to any cost of living or national pay awards. The research found that secretaries and caretakers have no access to the pay terms of national pay awards, incremental increases in pay, cost of living increases and overtime payments. Whenever the unions make a claim for pay increases they are ignored, discouraged, rejected or challenged to third party machinery on the grounds of inability to pay. The unions reported that many individual boards of management used the ancillary services grant for non-pay services, often paying cleaners from the same grant instead of the capitation grant. In these instances, secretaries and caretakers are told there is no money available to increase pay rates.
I want to discuss conditions of employment. IMPACT and SIPTU found that in every region throughout the country, those school secretaries and caretakers employed under the PESP scheme had no access to basic conditions including pension schemes or PRSAs; sick leave schemes; promotional opportunities; overtime payments for additional attendances; fair procedures such as disciplinary, grievance, bullying and harassment procedures; and contracts of employment either part-time, permanent, fixed term or indefinite duration and where contracts were offered they varied from school to school and were generally restrictive in terms of normal pay and conditions of employment.
In many cases IMPACT and SIPTU found secretaries and caretakers were paid by cheque or electronic funds transfer without the benefit of getting a pay slip. Some secretaries and caretakers got handwritten or printed pay slips which showed no deductions such as tax or PRSI. The main reason for that is the pay is so low it does not attract tax or PRSI. In many schools, the secretary and caretaker have no choice but to undertake additional duties appropriate to other grades within the school system.
School secretaries and caretakers in many schools across the country work in environments that are hostile to union membership, fair procedure and decent conditions of employment. We have spoken to many members about the palpable fear among them to raise even the simplest of issues with their principals or boards of management. In an era of industrial harmony and the development of social partnership and partnership in the workplace, how is it possible that these workers are the only grades throughout the public service who have no access to a standardised rate of pay or the basic conditions of employment? How is it that while IMPACT and SIPTU were central to negotiating improved pay and conditions of employment within the social partnership framework for our members, more than 90% of our members employed in schools throughout the country do not and cannot benefit from our efforts?
We have put forward some provisions for the future. It is imperative that these dedicated and essential workers are given parity of esteem within the education system. In this regard IMPACT and SIPTU require the following provisions be implemented. We seek the introduction of an equitable funding mechanism to replace the 1978, 1979 and 1990 PESP schemes that guarantees all school secretaries and caretakers in primary, secondary, community and comprehensive schools access to standardised rates of pay and conditions of employment commensurate with appropriate, equivalent and comparable public service grades. We also seek a commitment that any funding mechanism will ensure access to annual incremental adjustments and attract national agreement pay awards. We want commitments on schools funding in the programme for Government to be implemented without delay. We want standardised access to pension schemes, sick leave schemes and contracts and conditions of employment. We seek the immediate introduction of a promotional structure that recognises the responsible nature of the work secretaries perform and is not dependent on the numbers of either pupils or teaching posts within a school. We would like the current practice of capping advancement beyond the clerical officer grade 4 position, which is limited to one position per school with more than 41 wholetime teaching posts, to end. We call for the immediate establishment of industrial relations and partnership structures covering all teaching support grades in line with the provisions enshrined in successive social partnership agreements.
We thank the Chairman and members of the committee for giving us this opportunity to address these issues with them. We sincerely hope this information will be of assistance. Our members have a commitment to ensure Ireland's education system remains world class. Equally, we, as trade union officials, have a commitment to ensure that our members' working conditions are equitable and fair. We hope that with the committee's assistance the provisions we have put forward can be realised and implemented within the forthcoming 2008-09 school year.
