Update: Frontline ambulance workers pay issue resolved, staff to receive full wages
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Arrangements have been made this evening to ensure that frontline ambulance workers receive their full wages this week.
It follows criticism from SIPTU earlier today of a staff shortage issue in the National Ambulance Service’s payroll department which had led a situation where the full wages of some 150 emergency medical technicians (EMTs) were at risk of not being paid on Thursday.
SIPTU said they had been informed that the EMTs, who work in the intermediate care services area, would only get their basic pay, with no shift pay or overtime payments for the last two weeks, despite many being part of the State’s frontline response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
EMTs have been drafted in to conduct Covid-19 testing in coronavirus cluster settings such as meat processing plants, direct provision centres and nursing homes.
They have visited people’s homes and established pop-up testing facilities in communities as part of the measures designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The work has been ongoing seven days a week, with many EMTs working overtime.
But SIPTU has said in the last hour that the NAS has confirmed that additional resources are being assigned to its payroll department from tomorrow morning to ensure that the relevant payroll data is inputted to the system for all monies owed to its members.
SIPTU’s ambulance sector organiser, Miriam Hamilton, welcomed the resolution.
