25th November 2020
Dear member,
We write to advise you that the three teacher unions have been liaising closely in advance of any public sector pay talks, with a view to progressing our shared campaign for pay equality in the teaching profession. No issue has so united members across our unions as the need to end the ongoing and wholly unacceptable pay discrimination against the more recent entrants to our profession.
Following last week’s joint union statement overleaf, we now seek your support for an intensive lobby of public representatives.
During Easter 2019, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform provided our three unions with the following statement of intent, which was endorsed by the then Ministers for Education and Finance.
“On the issue of new entrant salary scales, certain unions have indicated that they have outstanding issues of concern following the agreement brokered in September 2018.
The management side understand that these outstanding matters will be given full consideration either by:
(i) any pay review mechanism agreed by the parties
or
(ii) in the context of the next round of pay talks.
It is recognised that the positions of each of the parties concerned on these matters must be given due regard in endeavouring to reach a mutually agreed resolution.”
The current public service agreement PSSA will end on 31 December. We need to make sure that our politicians are left in no doubt that the primary and post-primary teachers, and members of the other education grades which we represent, will not countenance another year during which pay inequality prevails.
We ask each one of you to contact government politicians from your constituency within the next week to ask them to commit to the resolution of this gross inequality in the next public sector pay deal.
We enclose contact details for TDs from all three government parties and hope that all members will get in touch with their local TDs in the coming days and deliver in the strongest terms the message that pay inequality must end.
Yours in solidarity,
Ann Piggott, Mary Magner, Martin Marjoram,
President, ASTI. President, INTO. President, TUI.
Joint Teacher Union Statement 18 November 2020
“The scandal of unequal pay continues to affect the teaching profession. Over the last decade each of our trade unions has sought to end this ongoing injustice and significant progress has been made.
In 2019, the government provided us with a statement of intent to finally resolve pay equality within the next public sector pay agreement.
We hold our government to their word and expect pay equality to be confined to the history books in the coming public sector pay agreement.
Tomorrow we will take this opportunity to restate to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science our commitment to ending pay inequality once and for all.
This inequality has led to demoralisation in the profession and has hampered our ability to retain teachers on this island.
Pay discrimination has resulted in a teacher recruitment and retention crisis that sees schools struggle to fill teaching vacancies.
It is grossly unfair to breach the ‘equal pay for equal work’ principle at any time and it is deeply offensive to all teachers, who have done so much to reopen and keep our schools open during the pandemic.”
- Kieran Christie, General Secretary, ASTI
- John Boyle, General Secretary, INTO
- Michael Gillespie, General Secretary, TUI