Staff at the Mater Private hospital in Dublin have served strike notice which they say will involve a full withdrawal of their labour from the start of next month.
Members of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Association and Siptu voted to take strike action in response to pay cuts of between 5 per cent and 7.5 per cent in basic pay, and a 5 per cent reduction in allowances, introduced from January 1st. The hospital has a staff of about 900, although not all are members of Siptu and the INMO.
“As the Mater Private is a profit making organisation, these imposed, un-agreed, pay cuts are in fact illegal and unnecessary,” the unions said in a joint statement.
The unions are seeking a reversal of the cuts.
INMO industrial relations officer Albert Murphy said: “These pay cuts are totally unnecessary and we will continue to seek their removal as we believe that this is an example of cheap opportunism, where an employer seeks to exploit the long standing goodwill of employees.”
Siptu health sector organiser Paul Bell said the hospital had “refused to enter any meaningful dialogue” with the two unions on the pay cuts.
“The focus of our dispute is the failure of management to negotiate with the unions as required by existing agreements regarding wage rates and security of employment.”
The strike action will begin at 7.30am on Monday, February 1st. It will be preceded by a protest between 1pm and 2pm at the hospital on Wednesday.
Mater Private chief executive Fergus Clancy confirmed pay cuts took effect from January 1st.
“It’s obviously disappointing that the unions have taken this position. From the hospital’s perspective, we very much regret the threat of strike action," he said.
“What we have sought to do is to adhere to the pay scales that have applied in the hospital since we opened in 1986, which are the public pay scales. We had communicated widely with staff of our intention to do that in the run-up to Christmas.”
Mr Clancy said the hospital had predicted prior to the Budget that it would need to introduce pay cuts.
“But given that our competitors, some of whom had already gone before the Budget with deeper pay cuts, we were determined to wait until we saw what happened with the national pay scales. Although competitors have gone deeper, we have made a decision not to break the agreement we have with unions to honour the public pay [scales].”
Mr Clancy said hospital staff had also been paid dividends by virtue of their participation in its share-ownership scheme.
“Staff actually own 15 per cent of the entire equity of the Mater Private hospital,” he said. “It is, we believe, unique in the world. It is certainly unique in Ireland that there is such a material amount of the equity of the hospital owned by the staff. What that has meant is that since 2005, we have distributed €34.5 million to our staff, which is equivalent to probably about €45,000 for every man and woman working at the hospital. And that is entirely over and above the national pay scales.”
Mr Clancy said the effect on the treatment of patients if strike action went ahead on February 1st would depend on what was agreed with unions.
“However, obviously our focus in advance of that would be to make every effort to ensure that doesn’t happen. If we do find ourselves having to deal with a strike, our focus then will be very much on trying to minimise the impact on patients. We are very anxious that at a time when patients are at their most vulnerable or distressed that we would be in a position to meet whatever their healthcare needs are as we always have done.
“We’ve never lost, since the day the hospital opened, so much as an hour to industrial unrest and we are determined if at all possible to avoid that.”
In a letter to all staff on January 12th, Mr Clancy said the cuts were “absolutely necessary for the protection of as many jobs as possible, and they follow a series of initiatives aimed at reducing our costs over the past eighteen months”.
He said the cuts impacted “on all staff and management, without exception”.
Mr Clancy said VHI had imposed a “massive cut” in prices, significantly reducing the hospital’s profitability. Customers were also trading down to lower plans which did not offer full cover at the hospital.
In addition, Government spending on healthcare, as well as the National Treatment Purchase Fund budget for 2010 had been cut by 10 per cent.