Paul Murphy demands pay parity for striking Northside home care staff
Paul Murphy raised the case of about 20 Northside home care health care assistants on strike, calling for pay parity and Section 39 treatment after their exclusion by the HSE. He asked the Taoiseach to request that the Minister for Health meet the workers and instruct the HSE to end the pay disparity.
Strike and worker presence
There are about 20 Northside home care health care assistants in the gallery who are on strike. Some have worked for 25 years and the workforce provides daily care for roughly 500 people.
Pay gap details
Workers cited pay rates as low as €15.04 an hour and some are paid the minimum wage, with frontline staff receiving about 30% less than colleagues doing the same roles elsewhere. The demand raised was for pay parity and proper treatment equivalent to Section 39 workers.
Labour WRC agreement and exclusions
Paul Murphy noted a Labour Workplace Relations Commission hearing on 10 March last year that produced an agreement on pay and conditions for bodies covered by Section 39 and related statutory provisions. That agreement applied to organisations under the Health Act and specific sections of the Child and Family Agency, Housing Act and Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Agency Act.
Tenders and contractual issue
The speech outlined that many home care assistants work for services funded through a separate competitive tendering process, which the HSE says is governed by distinct contractual arrangements. Those tender-based services are not automatically covered by the Section 39 framework, creating a contractual and funding complication.
Government response and next steps
Paul Murphy said he had previously raised the issue with the Taoiseach, who had spoken to the Minister and the HSE, but the dispute had returned to a one-day stoppage. He requested that the Taoiseach ask the Minister for Health to meet the workers and to instruct the HSE to treat them as Section 39 workers and implement pay parity, while acknowledging the difficulty of resolving the contractual differences.
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There's about 20 Northside home care health care assistants in the gallery. These workers are on strike today. Some of them have worked for 25 years and are only paid €15.04 an hour. Others are on minimum wage. They're getting about 30% less than others doing the same job as them are getting. They're providing vital care for about 500 people on a daily basis. The reason for this ultimately is because the HSE has arbitrarily excluded them from being treated as Section 39 workers. When this was raised with you when they were on strike in January, you said you talked to the Minister and the HSE to see if the issue can be satisfactorily resolved, averting any necessity for further industrial action. And yet here we are back again. Will you ask the Minister for Health to meet with these workers and will you instruct the HSE to treat these workers properly, to give them pay parity and to treat them as Section 39 workers? Thank you, Deputy Tisha. First of all, I do acknowledge the very significant contribution that health care assistants make to our health system. The difficulty here is that there was a Labour Workplace Relations Commission hearing on the 10th of March last year between ICTU unions and the relevant government departments and agreement was reached on pay and conditions. But that applied to Section 39 organisations under the Health Act, Section 56 of the Child and Family Agency, Section 10 of the Housing Act, Section 40 of the Domestic, Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Agency Act. So it applied to all of those, all bodies falling within those. Then there are many health care assistants who work on home care services, such as the Northside Home Care Service, that are funded through a separate competitive tendering process. That's a different mechanism, obviously, to the funding to Section 39. And the HSC are saying that those tender processes and services commissioned by those tender processes are governed by separate contractual arrangements with providers. And there is an issue there. It's not easily resolved. But the... Again, I talked to the Minister again to see, now there is a one-day stoppage, obviously. We don't want the industrial election taking place. There's people that feel the need to do it. And I appreciate that, too. But we will... Sorry, I'll talk to the Minister again and see what we can do. Thank you. We now...
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