Nearly 40,000 hospital support staff to ballot for strike action

Nearly 40,000 healthcare staff are to ballot for industrial action in a dispute over delays in re-introducing an evaluation scheme for jobs.

The trade union Siptu said the row could lead to strikes of one or two days' duration. Impact said a decision on the nature of industrial action would be taken when the ballot result was known in mid-August.

Both unions said the Lansdowne Road public service agreement contained a provision to re-introduce a system for scientifically measuring and assessing the roles played by healthcare staff to determine if they were on the correct grade. The unions said a previous arrangement had been shelved unilaterally by management in 2008.

Under such job evaluations, if a person’s role or workload or responsibility is found to have expanded, they could qualify for an upgrade involving a pay rise.

Siptu health division organiser Paul Bell said more than 30,000 support staff in hospitals would be balloted next month as a result of delays on the part of the HSE in putting in place the job evaluation scheme.

He said the groups of workers who would be balloting included healthcare assistants, technicians who sterilised instruments as well as laboratory staff.

Impact said it would be balloting about 8,000 health service clerical, administrative and management staff for industrial action “over management’s failure to meet its commitment to re-open the HSE job evaluation scheme”.

Impact said the scheme, which was meant to be re-introduced for health service clerical and administrative grades in June 2016, offered staff the prospect of an upgrading if their job roles and responsibilities were found to have increased sufficiently.

The union maintained that during the eight-year suspension of the scheme, a significant backlog of existing and potential applications had grown up among workers who “had taken on substantial extra responsibilities as staff numbers fell dramatically during the crisis”.

Impact national secretary Eamonn Donnelly said the union had identified job evaluation as a core issue in the Lansdowne Road talks last year.

“Our health service members backed the deal on the clear understanding that it would deliver the re-opening of the HSE scheme. I agree when I hear ministers says that Lansdowne Road is the only game in town. But I can’t find the section of the agreement that allows management to pick and choose the bits it wants to abide by.”

Impact said that as recently as April, the HSE had agreed the terms and timetable for the re-introduction of the job evalusation scheme.

“It subsequently became clear that health service management wanted to renege on the deal, despite the clear Lansdowne Road agreement commitment that the scheme would be re-opened,” Mr Donnelly said.

Separately, Siptu is already planning to stage a strike in the national ambulance service from Wednesday, August 10th.

The union said this dispute is about the conditions of employment for members in the national ambulance service.