Retained firefighters call off strike after deal on ‘guaranteed’ pay

Industrial action by around 2,000 members of the retained fire service was suspended on Thursday after talks between the Local Government Management Association (LGMA) and Siptu at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) that lasted more than 12 hours.

The talks ended after midnight with agreement on a document that included substantial improvements on pay and a commitment to address other issues raised during the dispute including recruitment and rostering, the union said afterwards.

The talks had been prompted by Minister for Local Government Darragh O’Brien and were attended by officials from his department.

Siptu is to hold meetings around the country over the coming weeks to outline the terms of the proposed deal with balloting expected to start around the end of this month or start of September.

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Under the terms of the agreement, Siptu divisional organiser Karan O Loughlin said, the guaranteed element of pay for new entrants could roughly double to provide the service with the sort of “floor of guaranteed earnings” that had been a key objective for the firefighters since their industrial action started two months ago.

“Under the terms agreed, a new entrant will be guaranteed they will earn about €18,500 in their first year, and they will reach the top of the scale quicker than they do now. They will be able to earn in excess of that with call-outs but the floor of earnings for the newcomer would be improved and that obviously has a knock-on effects for somebody already in the service and for other grades.

“So where previously, a new recruit would be guaranteed earnings of less than €10,000 and would have spent €2,500 of that getting their C Licence (a required qualification), now there’ll be guaranteed about €18,500 and the employer will pay for the licence,” Ms O Loughlin said.

Those figures would be taken forward into the national public sector pay talks that are due to start in the early autumn, she said.

“So, we’ve managed to create a floor for guaranteed earnings for the firefighters which was a key issue for us. It’s not the end of the campaign. But it is an important step and we will suspend the industrial pending consideration of the document,” Ms O Loughlin said.

“If it is accepted then we’ll move into the next phase of the campaign which is to have the next enhancement of the retainer dealt with through the public sector pay talks and to look to deal with the development of the policy pieces that were discussed this evening.”

Ms O Loughlin said outstanding issues would include local authority policies for hiring and the retirement age and that these would “require a bit of work but we got commitments from the LGMA tonight that they will do that work. Elements of the recent Labour Court recommendation remain and there are other things to work on, but there is no way we would have got that work done tonight.

“As it is, we felt that was on the table [and] was a move in the right direction, that it needed to be put to our people so the strike will be suspended. We will wait for the document agreed this evening to be produced over the next day or two and we will take it to them,” she said.