Health board offices and the Department of Health are to be targeted by SIPTU in a campaign this week to highlight the plight of 100 members owed £1.5 million in arrears for their work with psychiatric patients and the mentally handicapped.
The workers have been engaged in a limited work-to-rule for several weeks but have stopped short of strike action. The staff are employed by Eastern Vocational Enterprises, a stand-alone agency providing community-based services for people with intellectual disabilities. It is funded by the Department of Health and Children via the Eastern Regional Health Authority and the South West Area Health Board.
The complex bureaucratic arrangements are being blamed by SIPTU branch secretary Mr Paul Bell for the delays in processing the pay award for his members, who are owed between £1,000 and £18,000 each.
The arrears relate to a regrading of Eastern Vocational Enterprises Holdings staff dating back to 1997. Although the regradings were agreed in principle then, negotiations on the mechanics of the award were only finalised last January. A down-payment of £750 each has been paid to SIPTU members.
Yesterday, Ms Joan Brown, a personal development co-ordinator for Eastern Vocational Enterprises Holdings, said at its centre in Dublin: "SIPTU members will be dying or retiring before this is sorted out. We have no date for receiving our arrears and they cannot give us a date."
Mr Bell said payment had been promised on February 1st but no money materialised.
"The release of these pay arrears seems to have been tied up in a tangle of red tape involving at least four different public bodies. Our members are being forced reluctantly into a position where industrial action may be the only way to cut through this bureaucratic nightmare."
While a strike ballot is planned, SIPTU members are expected to begin disruptive protests over the next few days.
Mr Bell said he made representations to the Department of Health only to be told in a letter on April 9th that it had received its first submission on funding the arrears from the ERHA on March 22nd. "Despite our best efforts, the South West Health Board and ERHA have not responded to my requests for a date for payment since," he added.
He sent a copy of the Department's letter to the ERHA and SWHB on April 10th but has so far received no reply.
A spokeswoman for the South West Health Board said that following negotiations, a new pay offer had been issued to SIPTU members through the Labour Relations Commission last January.
The union had only accepted the offer at the end of January. The health board was negotiating the remainder of the funding with the ERHA.