The Irish Nurses Organisation (INO) and the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) are refusing to participate in benchmarking and are to bring eight claims relating to pay and working hours before the Labour Relations Commission (LRC).
The unions do not believe benchmarking can deliver on their claims since they met with the Health Service Executive (HSE) on February 10th, when their demands were rejected.
However, the HSE has responded by saying some of the most pressing demands of the unions have already been dismissed by the Labour Court and that their demands in their entirety would cost €1.67 billion to introduce.
The INO says nurses are the second-lowest paid workers in the health sector despite the fact that an honours degree is now required to qualify.
Speaking to ireland.com, INO deputy general secretary Dave Hughes added that in some cases nurses would have to work for over two decades to be entitled to the pay earned by staff they actually supervise.
"In the case of childcare workers, both qualified and unqualified, nurses who supervise them have to spend 21 years in the profession before they are paid more than the people they supervise," he said.
The Labour Court rejected the claim for increased pay on April 1st 2004, according to the HSE, but it recommended that the matter be given priority in the next benchmarking exercise, which the unions have now snubbed.
The HSE estimates the cost of 10.6 per cent increase to all nursing pay grades to be €184 million per annum, while unions are seeking three years' retrospective payments at a cost of €460 million.
The unions are also pursuing a "long-standing" claim for a 35-hour week for their members. Such conditions would be in line with hours worked by other healthcare professionals, Mr Hughes said.
He said that despite recommendations by the Labour Court in 1980 stipulating that nurses should be among one of the first groups to have a shortened week, there has still been no movement in that direction.
Nurses are now the only group within the public and civil service, as well as the health service, that are not rostered for a 35-hour week. In reality, however, there are very few health service staff who do not work overtime.
The HSE says the Labour Court rejected this claim in 2003, while an additional 4,000 nurses would need to be employed at a cost of €194 million per annum to facilitate such a move.
The HSE added that the demand of unions for the introduction of a Dublin weighting allowance for 3,000 nurses will cost €52 million and, again, was dismissed by the Labour Court on June 18th, 2003.
PNA general secretary Des Kavanagh stressed today that both unions "will be making every effort to resolve these issues through existing procedures but will not tolerate the no comment approach adopted by the previous benchmarking body in the past".
