Waging a campaign to deliver equal pay for equal work

The INTO continues to fight for equal pay and pension rights for all teachers and never ‘colluded’ with Government to cut new entrants’ pay, says Sheila Nunan.

Pay and investment go hand in hand in creating efficient and well-run public services.

They aren’t mutually exclusive. Teachers are entitled to equal pay and to work in a school which receives adequate financial investment to enable them to get on with their primary role as educators.

Irish primary schools receive significantly less funding than second and third-level institutions. Funding in primary schools amounts to less than €1 per pupil per day to cover their running costs.

Second-level schools get almost double that amount. Overall, for every €8 spent on primary schools, €11 is spent at second level, and €15 at third level. The standard capitation grant per pupil has dropped from €200 in 2010 to €178 at present — in contrast to the current figure of €311 at post-primary level.

Annual expenditure per student in Ireland is lower than the OECD average for pre-primary and primary education. Such underinvestment leads to mass fundraising campaigns in schools to deliver some €40m a year to cover basic needs.

And by basic, I don’t mean those things which are nice to have but not critical, I mean things like projector light bulbs. Those opposed to organised labour will have you believe it’s a choice — one or the other. That’s a cop-out which most people see through.

The notion that the trade union movement, and my own, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation in particular, somehow colluded with the Government to cut pay for newer entrants to the teaching profession from 2011. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Government, as part of the financial bailout, unilaterally imposed an across-the-board cut of 10% at each point on the scale and new teachers were further reverted to the start of the scale having previously started on the second point. Unions weren’t consulted. We didn’t support this draconian move then and we don’t support it now.

Indeed, over the last decade we have committed ourselves to reversing these cuts and have made tangible progress for our younger members in doing so.

Back in 2011, these cuts amounted to a career loss of over €300,000, which stripped those teachers affected of financial security. In the intervening years, the INTO fought back. Despite newer entrants being a minority of our membership, it was and remains a priority for our whole union.

That’s solidarity, members standing together to support one another. It’s the very basis on which the trade union movement began. But you won’t hear that from the right, from those who buy into a philosophy that views organised labour as the enemy, standing in the way of unchecked free market economics.

Over the last decade, INTO has fought a campaign on all fronts to deliver equal pay for equal work. We secured moderate restorations from a series of public sector agreements including the Haddington Road Agreement and the Lansdowne Agreement.

Throughout the course of the current Public Sector Stability Agreement, we continued to fight for pay restoration. Following our last tranche of negotiations late last year, we put the final offer from Government to a ballot of our members.

While it might have been easy to pocket the short-term restorations, our members, acting in solidarity with one another patently refused the offer. Our engagement with Government continues.

Indeed, the Education Minister Joe McHugh, himself a teacher by profession, has acknowledged that this is unfinished business for new entrants. Although, given a 2011 entrant will have worked in the profession for almost a decade, the term ‘new’ hardly seems appropriate.

In his Irish Examiner column this week, Gerard Howlin suggests that we have somehow misappropriated the term ‘equal pay for equal work’.

How?

The fact is teachers in this country, perhaps even teaching in neighbouring classrooms are being paid less for doing the same job. Surely that meets the very definition of inequality.

Mr Howlin charges unions, such as the INTO, with collusion on changes to pension schemes for new entrants, introduced by the government. Teachers, for their part, pay into their pension schemes.

Debating whether these schemes are better than private sector offerings misses this point completely. Every worker, whether in the public or private sector is entitled to security in retirement. As a society, we risk pushing the buck down the line and all the problems imaginable as a result.

The INTO, for our part, will continue to advocate that our members, teachers in classrooms right across the country, deserve and will pay into a pension scheme which offers them some security in retirement.

To be clear, all members of the INTO, regardless of which pension scheme they are subscribed to, have rejected the race to the bottom on pension provision. Indeed our 2017 Congress condemned attempts to play off private sector and public sector workers in the area of pensions.

And while the public service pension terms introduced for entrants since 2013 are not as good as those of previous schemes, INTO campaigned against the reduced terms from the outset.

As part of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, we have ensured that pension contributions are now less than those paid for pre-2013 schemes. That’s genuine intergenerational solidarity, typical of our union membership.

Our primary school teachers have been highly regarded by top international commentators, including Pasi Sahlberg who noted the high calibre of entrants to initial teacher education in Ireland and concluded that the academic standard of applicants is amongst the highest, if not the highest, in the world.

In the most recent Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which measures the reading achievement of primary pupils near the end of fourth class, Ireland’s score was significantly higher than most other participating countries.

Only two countries (the Russian Federation and Singapore) achieved mean scores that were significantly higher than Ireland’s. Primary school teachers are delivering for Ireland’s future.

Sheila Nunan is INTO general secretary.