Failure over jobs pledge will provoke a strike, meeting told

Strike action will be taken in any Vocational Educational Committee area where there is a failure to implement the Programme …

Strike action will be taken in any Vocational Educational Committee area where there is a failure to implement the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW), the Teachers Union of Ireland president told 400 delegates at the union's annual congress in Galway.

Under the PCW the TUI was promised permanent jobs for members working in the Vocational Training Opportunities Scheme, said Ms Alice Prendergast.

A circular was issued by the Department of Education and Science four weeks ago, but the union had learned that the Irish Vocational Educational Association and the VECs were refusing to implement it, she said.

"If any member of this union refused to carry out a lawful instruction from their principal or director they would be suspended. I now call on the Minister for Education to dissolve any VEC which refuses to carry out the lawful instructions of the Department.

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"This is war, and the TUI can assure the IVEA that it will not allow breaches of the PCW, to which all parties subscribed . . . We call on and expect no less than full backing from ICTU on this matter." To applause from delegates, Ms Prendergast said that as ICTU had brokered the agreement it had better see it carried out.

The TUI wants a mandatory code of discipline in every school with explicit sanctions, including suspension, expulsion and exclusion of students. "For too long members have suffered verbal abuse, threats, assaults and other forms of intimidation. This behaviour may come from pupils, parents, guardians, other staff members or visitors," said Ms Prendergast.

The constitutional right of individual pupils would have to be evaluated against the constitutional rights of the rest of the class to education. The Department would have to make provision for violent and disruptive students outside the classroom and in some cases outside the school, she said.

Ms Prendergast said that not all bullies in schools and colleges were students.

"Bullying is where an individual abuses a position of power or authority over another person . . . Perhaps the most subtle form of bullying is exclusion, where a teacher can be ostracised, boycotted, excluded or disregarded.

"Bullying is not a once-off `losing of the head', it is the consistent, offensive, humiliating behaviour which attempts to undermine an individual or group of employees and causes them to suffer stress." She asked delegates if they had been the victim of or witnessed any of the following examples of bullying, which she had heard of over the past 18 months: "shouting at a teacher to get things done; humiliating a teacher in front of their colleagues; picking on one teacher when there was a common problem; conduct that denigrates or ridicules a teacher in front of their colleagues; consistently undermining someone and their ability to do their job."

The redrafted Employment Equality Bill still contained sections which the TUI found unacceptable, Ms Prendergast said. These sections included discrimination by religious, educational and medical institutions run for religious purposes where "they provide more favourable treatment on the religion ground to an employee which is reasonable in order to maintain the religious ethos of the institution or take necessary action to prevent an employee undermining the ethos.

"We still regard this section as a divisive, community-splitting, anti-secular scrutiny of our private lives," she said.

The union also has reservations about the second Education Bill. Ms Prendergast said they would insist that the Bill would not become law until their concerns were addressed.

She also condemned the Minister's decision to leave out the requirement for gender balance on the boards of management.

The TUI congratulated the Minister on his initiative in awarding grants to students in the Post Leaving Certificate sector, but said the grants indicated that these students were not pursuing a second-level course.

"If the students are not sitting second-level exams, then the teachers are not teaching at second level. There is a clear and obvious case for the payment of the right rate for the job for our members in this sector," Ms Prendergast told delegates.

The area of adult education was described as a "battlefield", with TUI members in the Youthreach area still awaiting permanent positions. The disadvantaged continued to be taught by the most disadvantaged teachers.

Ms Prendergast called for a constitutional amendment to address the fact that Seanad Eireann had representatives elected by some universities and not others and had no representatives from the Institutes of Technology.