The Government has been accused of resorting to an unlawful system of contract working to avoid recruiting permanent professional staff in the Heritage Service and Office of Public Works.
IMPACT, the union representing the professionals concerned, has sanctioned a series of demonstrations outside public buildings to highlight their plight.
It has also warned the Government that if any of its members on contract are let go, it will ballot for full-scale industrial action. The contract workers include architects, archaeologists and wildlife inspectors.
A strike would severely disrupt the prison-building programme and the Rural Environmental Protection Scheme (REPS) for over 30,000 farmers. IMPACT's assistant general secretary, Mr Kevin Callinan, said up to a third of the 300 professionals in the services affected are on short-term contracts; some as short as three months.
Similar contracts used to employ food demonstrators in supermarkets were found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court in a test case late last year. The demonstrators were technically selfemployed, but despite having signed contracts stating they were self-employed, the court found they were for all practical purposes employees.
The IMPACT dispute is the first time a union has raised the issue of this type of contract in the public service. Mr Callinan says the Office of Public Works has not employed a permanent person in those grades since 1981.
After failing to resolve the problem internally, Mr Callinan said management refused to refer the dispute to the Labour Relations Commission, on the basis that the people concerned were on commissions, rather than employees.
"There is a major question mark now over the employment practices of two government departments, who are using contracts which the Revenue Commissioners and Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs might find irregular," he said.
Neither the OPW nor the Department could say how many professionals were working on commissions. The dispute was the subject of ongoing discussions with IMPACT. The Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs said it would have to know more about the details of the contracts before it could comment on the union's claims.