Delegates at the annual Teachers Union of Ireland (TUI) conference have instructed union leadership to renegotiate a recent deal with Government that was designed to improve working conditions for more than 3,000 adult educators.
The deal providing for the Education and Training Board (ETB) educators to earn between €35,000 and €65,000, was announced at last year’s TUI conference.This week Minister for Further Education James Lawless said he is unhappy the agreement’s terms have not yet been fully honoured by all ETBs.
Despite opposition from the union executive, a motion was passed by delegates at the TUI conference instructing the leadership to renegotiate the deal and to ballot for industrial action across the sector if this cannot be done.
James O’Keeffe, an adult educator based in Dublin, said the sector’s workers were promised in 2018 a vote on any deal, but then never got their say on an agreement that fell well short of what many had expected.
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He said adult educators have always felt they should be graded as teachers rather than as youthreach workers, which is a position the Labour Court declined to recommend in 2020.
Some have been told their pension provisions would actually be worse rather than better under their new terms of employment, Mr O’Keefe said, adding that some still have to sign on to the dole during holiday periods because they are not classified as full-time workers.
“Some of the issues involved are only impacting small numbers of people but they are big issues for those people,” he said. “But some of the things are just crazy, like colleges saying they are not getting the money they require to pay the wages due under the deal when it was always known there would be a cost increase, and a refusal on the part of others to recognise the correction of student work as part of the job.”
Opposing the motion, executive member Vivienne Keenan said the aims are “understandable and commendable” but the deal is a “significant improvement” on what went before. She said it would be difficult to secure something better by strike action, as many in the area are not union members.
Ann Foster, of the Dublin city union branch, said there seems to be “some sort of allergy to the words “industrial action”. She claimed the educators involved have been “screwed at every stage of this process”.
TUI assistant general secretary Colm Kelly said the union’s executive will consider the motion in the coming weeks. However, he said, the Labour Court’s recommendation constrained its ability to achieve a better outcome in previous negotiations.
“The TUI aspired to ensure that the deal was better. Unfortunately, the Labour Court recommendation wasn’t what we had hoped for. It said the offer ... shouldn’t be consistent with the grade of teacher. We were very disappointed in that. But from our perspective, what was put on the table was a significant step forward.”
He said the union is pursuing a claim for the prior service of educators to be recognised.
