Head over to our T
Shorter Working Year Scheme
Read more about: Labour Party 
Friend of the Blog Joanna Tuffy has a press release today.
The government decision to collapse the talks about public service reform and reject union proposals for unpaid leave, is all the more inexplicable given that the Minister for the Environment, John Gormley, wrote to all local authorities in June of this year authorising all councils to grant unpaid leave to their employees.
‘Circular E.L. 09/09 – Shorter Working Year Scheme’ was issued to councils on June 5th and provides for a number of measures, including the introduction of unpaid special leave. The scheme is open to council employees in established or unestablished positions and can range from two weeks to 13 weeks.
If unpaid leave is acceptable for those working in local authorities, why was it rejected by the government as part of a package of measures to reduce the overall public sector wage bill? The two Green Ministers in government were reported to be particularly opposed to the unpaid leave proposal, yet here was Minister Gormley promoting such a scheme for his own area of responsibility less than six months ago.
The government’s handling of the negotiations last week has robbed us of the opportunity of major reform in the public service, dealt a fatal blow to social partnership and leaves us facing the prospect of industrial action across the public service.
Now leaving aside the whole debate on the rights and wrongs on annual leave being the solution to our problems. I just want to mention a few things about this. Now I couldn’t find Circular E.L. 09/09 – Shorter Working Year Scheme but could find Circular 14/2009 – Shorter Working Year Scheme. I will presume (correct me if I am wrong) that they are the same save 14/2009 came from the Department of Finance.
The aim of the scheme was to permit civil servants to
balance their working arrangements with outside commitments including the school holiday period of their children.
Which is quiet a nice scheme for say single parents during summer holidays etc. However a few key differences exist between this scheme and the one that the Unions were proposing.
First up it says, business demands may preclude the granting of the leave i.e. only if the persons role is coverable by replacements or others. Two this measure was brought in as a “work -Life” balance measure rather then a cost saving measure.
The unions idea from what I have heard was a simple blanket annual leave deal. Regardless of the business demands. Also I suspect without the addition of extra staff to cover the 12 days leave that each person is supposed to get. So there is to me significant enough differences between these two measures to signify why you could be in favour of one and not the other.
Simon,
The brassneckery of it would leave one breathless, if one wasn’t already out of breath from laughing.
Down in the hairdressers’ this afternoon, apart from stomach curdling ‘celebrity’ magazines the only newspaper available was the Irish Daily Mirror, though why it should be called a newspaper is another day’s work.
On page 2, there was a picture of Joan Burton, not looking too happy at all. The electorate would see through the government’s offer to ‘share the pain’ by taking massive salary cuts of their own, she was quoted as saying. She further opined that public servants would see through it too, as the same government imposed a further pay cut on them after the ‘pensions levy’ pay cut they forced upon them last April. On ‘This Week’ yesterday, I’m certain I heard Joan Burton say she always thought the ICTU plan for unpaid leave was “ridiculous”. I’m certain of it because, like Bishop Brennan in that old ‘Father Ted’ episode, I still can’t close my mouth properly. Because on Friday, the Labour party leader, standing on the plinth at Leinster House, had described the government as ‘stupid’ for not concluding the deal with the public service unions. The same day, Labour published its Budget proposals which specified a €1.3bn saving in public service pay in 2010, without giving any indication of how this saving was to be achieved beyond some vacuous waffle about a ‘negotiated agreement’ with the unions. And since the only proposal on the table was the unpaid leave scheme…..
It’s part of the luxury of being in Opposition that you can change your policy depending on what direction the political (and popular) wind is blowing and normally nobody takes a blind bit of notice. That’s just politics, and fair dues if you can get away with it. But in the current crisis, such a profusion of nuances over a period of three days, from a party that’s demanding a general election in the expectation of senior Cabinet positions for its leadership, is really quite extraordinary and stretches credibility to breaking point.
Joanna Tuffy may have got it wrong; and no doubt if she has, or hasn’t, she will be able to provide appropriate clarification in her own right. Or maybe there’s a political strategy at work here? To get out there and create as much confusion as possible, because the mainstream media can be guaranteed not to notice the contradictions or ask any awkward questions even if they did. As for us, the voters, sure we’re just fools.
Simon,
Many thanks for the coverage.
Work life balance is really orwellion speak for save money. Do you really think that in the year that is in it suddenly the Government want people to take up to 13 weeks unpaid leave because they are worried they are not spending enough time with the children?
The Councils have also been asked to send their employees on incentivised career breaks, incentivised early retirement and to effectively make redundant any one they can (and hence the cut in 4000 temporary council staff over the past year).
Here is an extract from circular 09/09 for your information:
“A Dhuine Uasail
1. I am directed by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage & Local Government to announce the Shorter Working Year Scheme. This circular supersedes the Term Time Circular LG(P) 20/2006 . The purpose of the shorter working year scheme is to permit local authority employees to balance their working arrangements with outside commitments, including the school holiday periods of their children. Under the terms of the scheme, special leave is available as a period of 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 or 13 consecutive weeks. The leave may be taken as one continuous period, or as a maximum of 3 separate periods each consisting of not less than 2 weeks and not exceeding 13 weeks in total. The period of leave shall be unpaid special leave (see paragraph 12).
Eligibility to apply
2. To be eligible to apply for unpaid special leave, a person must be serving in a Local Authority in an established or unestablished position (full-time staff, worksharers and other part-time staff are eligible to apply). Employees on probation at the time it is proposed to take the special leave are not entitled to participate. A local authority employee on special leave retains his or her local authority employee status and is subject to all relevant legislation and codes, including the code of conduct and the disciplinary code.”
@Joanna
If unpaid leave is acceptable for those working in local authorities, why was it rejected by the government as part of a package of measures to reduce the overall public sector wage bill?
Surely you see the difference between say local authority clerical staff and those involved in frontline service delivery such as nurses, teachers and Gardaí?
You’re no doubt aware that clerical officers are already eligible to take up to 18 flexi-days off a year on full pay. Do you think such a scheme would also be workable for frontline rôles?
Would you agree that the public service is not an homogenous monolith? Can we extrapolate from that to the idea that fundamentally different terms & conditions would be appropriate across the service?
Work life balance is really orwellion speak for save money.
Agreed – and this is how it has been seen in my own workplace.
Surely you see the difference between say local authority clerical staff and those involved in frontline service delivery such as nurses, teachers and Gardaí? [...] Can we extrapolate from that to the idea that fundamentally different terms & conditions would be appropriate across the service?
A nice argument if you’re trying to divide the public sector unions – which you’re not, of course, looking to do.
Is anyone really that surprised that these talks failed?
The biggest clue to the government’s thinking was the various speeches by the taniste which took the line that there would be talks, but they were willing to push the provisions through without the union’s approval. These were just the backstop; if the talks actually worked the favor would rebound to the government, if they failed; as they did, the scorn would rebound to the ‘intransigent” unions. The government was dead set on implementation of Snip, and didn’t want to hear anything but Snip.
Proposition Joe,
I accept that point you make but that is very different to the perception created that forced unpaid leave was unacceptable per se and somehow that public sector workers actually want to be made take unpaid days off. These workers are already down on income since last year and many have mortgages to pay.
As a public servant wrote in a letter to the Sunday Tribune yesterday, “When private sector workers are given unpaid leave this is called reduced hours, but when public service workers are threatened with unpaid leave this is called holidays”. The net point of my statement above was that unpaid leave it turns out is not such an acceptable practice for the Government afterall and only recently Minister Gormley was positively promoting it for local authority staff.
As whether it could work for gardai, nurses and teachers, why wouldn’t it be workable considering we already allow gardai, nurses and teachers job share etc.?
A nice argument if you’re trying to divide the public sector unions – which you’re not, of course, looking to do.
Just trying to make the obvious point that the unpaid leave idea simply wouldn’t have worked across large swathes of the public service.
If the core strategy from the unions’ point of view was to make the pay cut temporary, then that’s where they should have set their stall from the get-go. Take the cut, but make it contingent on pay-rates being restored on the delivery of verifiable efficiencies. The insistence on unpaid leave was indicative of incredible naïveté on the unions’ part.
@Joanna
As whether it could work for gardai, nurses and teachers, why wouldn’t it be workable considering we already allow gardai, nurses and teachers job share etc.?
Because job sharing arrangements necessarily require increased headcount to avoid diminishing frontline service levels.
Headcount is obviously not going to increased any time soon.
So the obvious conclusion is that service levels would have been impacted by the unpaid leave.
Proposition Joe,
That reduced service and extra work load for remaining public servants is going to happen anyway because of the voluntary unpaid leave schemes as per my statement, the recruitment embargo, the incentivised early retirement, the letting go of temporary public sector workers in the local authorities and HSE and the possible implementation of the McCarthy Report necessitating compulsory redundancies. Not to mention hours lost through industrial action that could have been averted.
Meanwhile in other countries they are doing things differently and are turning their economies around for the better.
@Joanna
There’s a common thread in all those effective headcount reduction measure you mention.
Those schemes are all applied selectively across the public sector, mostly to over-resourced back-office functions, with the frontline being protected to some extent.
The obvious Achilles heal in the unions’ proposal was to insist on applying the measure globally.
Just like the nurses demanding their hours be cut by 10% in 2007 while claiming that service levels would be somehow unaffected, it simply doesn’t stand up logically that frontliners could take 12 days off even spread over a number of years without an impact being felt by service users.
Proposition Joe,
There are less public health nurses in the HSE than last year. So much for selectivity.
You may not be aware but so called Frontline services are generally not exempt from the recruitment embargo. And tell any one on unemployment that the Social welfare staff and Community Welfare Officers (who also have to help those suffering hardship by the floods) that they are not frontline.
There are less public health nurses in the HSE than last year. So much for selectivity.
On Nurses. From the OECD
Not sure this is relevant in this debate but that number never ceases to surprise me.
@Joanna
Has the reduction in public health nurses come about as a result of either the incentivized early retirement scheme or the incentivized career break scheme or the shorter working year scheme? The promotion of the latter scheme by Minister Gormley being your original point, right?
Those schemes are indeed selective … so, so much for your “so much for selectivity” argument.
And on the subject of social welfare’s sluggish responses to the current crises … surely you must know that much of the problem derives from the CPSU’s intransigence in refusing to agree to redeployment and streamlined decision-making. Currently the delay in new jobseekers claims in Edenderry stands at a glacial 22 weeks. Or 154 days if you prefer. Largely because the local CPSU heads are dragging their heals on making decisions in the hopes of scoring a few HEO promotions. Now, would 12 days extra leave make that 154 day delay go up or down?
Simon,
Makes up for the factor that we have a lower ratio of doctors to the population compared to most countries?
The OECD also found that we have a modest sized public service and that when it comes to public spending we come 3rd from the bottom of 19 countries!.
As for public health nurses most women that have recently had babies would tell you that there are not enough public health nurses as it stands, and it’s getting worse.
Proposition Joe,
My net point was that for all the jumping up and down last week by various including Gormley turns out the Government is happy to bring in schemes that have expanded the unpaid leave provisions within the public sector.
Unpaid leave schemes, job sharing, career breaks and early retirement are not applied selectively to the public sector, they exist in every part of the public sector including for gardai, nurses and teachers.
Now Joanna, apples and oranges.
You started off with the recently introduced unpaid leave schemes that are expressly designed to save money by reducing effective headcount. These are most certainly selectively applied.
Now you’ve conflated this with the long-established career breaks for teachers, that do not reduce headcount as the teacher is generally replaced with a temporary whole-time sub while they’re away. The availability of this sort of break is a perk for the teachers involved, not a money-saving arrangement. These breaks are also a prime contributor to the poor working conditions and insecurity suffered by young teachers, but that’s neither here nor there.
Similarly job-sharing is a benefit designed to allow for flexible work-life balance, not to reduce costs. A single job is shared amoung multiple workers, so there is no reduction in wholetime-equivalent headcount. Though there is a big increase in net cost to the state, due to the progressivity of the tax system.
Finally the early retirement schemes you refer to are again perks pure and simple that end up imposing substantial additional costs on the state. The fact that “burned out” teachers could retire up to the seven years early is a very expensive way of freeing up a post for a young teacher. And in any case, that particular scheme is now closed.
Makes up for the factor that we have a lower ratio of doctors to the population compared to most countries?
Probably not. But it does suggest that we could nearly half the numbers of nurses and still have the same numbers as the OECD average. If we applied the savings from halving the Nurses and used that saving to hire more doctors. Maybe we might get closer to the Average number of doctors. It is just amazing that we have such an amount of them. If we have so few public health nurses yet so many nurses maybe it is a problem with deployment rather then numbers.
Simon,
The one time I was in hospital for more than just a day visit it was very much the nurses that were doing most of the work and seemed the most experienced and knowledgeable, so I am not so sure your proposal would work.
Proposition Joe,
My net point is that the Government does not in practice have any problem with unpaid leave despite the jumping up and down about it last week.
And as to your apples and oranges point – unpaid leave already exists for eligible workers under the Parental Leave legislation in all sectors of the public sector, so your argument that is not workable is contradicted by the fact that a similar scheme for some gardai, nurses and teachers already exists.
The Shorter Working Year Scheme originally existed for the civil service, in recent months it was extended to the local authorities. Don’t be so sure that it won’t be introduced for the Gardai for the exact reason you give – to save costs.
Joanna,
The central flaw in your argument is, as P Joe keeps pointing out, that selective schemes that have a primarily social objective (work/life balance, bereavement leave, parental leave) are one thing and likely to apply only to small numbers of personnel working in those sectors at any one time. They can therefore be accommodated without undue disruption of services or through temporary replacements. The notion that unpaid leave could be viably used as a mechanism to cut the pay bill across a public sector of 300,000 employees is a beast of an entirely different colour.
Short-time working in the private sector is a response to a drop in demand for goods or services. There is no fall-off in demand for key frontline public services, nor likely to be in the forseeable future. And that’s only one of the arguments that was advanced against this completely daft and unworkable ICTU proposal whose key objective was avoid any downward adjustment in existing pay rates.
You either can’t see this, or you don’t want to see it. That’s your right. Cheap political point scoring on the basis of a bogus argument is fair enough in your line of business; but it doesn’t alter the facts.
@Joanna
The one time I was in hospital for more than just a day visit it was very much the nurses that were doing most of the work and seemed the most experienced and knowledgeable
The dynamic of modern a hospital is much more complex than that. Nurses come with a variety of qualification levels, from low-qualified time-servers to well-qualified recent graduates to hyper-qualified advanced practioners. Similarly with so-called “junior” docs, some of whom are well into their thirties with international experience and on the fast-track to very advanced practice.
Unless of course you just wanted to make a populist warm’n'fuzzy feel-good point about the loverly nurses, aren’t they great? Which is fine in and of itself, just not much use when it comes to formulating a workable health policy.
The parental leave scheme, the term time working (which the Shorter Working Year replaced) were unpaid leave schemes that were based on work life balance.
However the Shorter Working Year Scheme and its blanket application whether you have a family or not and to be taken at any time, on top of the 4000 local authority job cuts, the recruitment embargo and various other schemes (such as paying people to take career breaks) has nothing to do with work life balance. It is about saving money pure and simple in local authorities and it will have an impact on services. In the recent flooding some local councils were struggling because they had lost hundreds of staff in the past year. It is not just the gardai and nurses that we need at times of emergency.
The parental leave scheme, the term time working (which the Shorter Working Year replaced) were unpaid leave schemes that were based on work life balance.
However the Shorter Working Year Scheme and its blanket application whether you have a family or not and to be taken at any time, on top of the 4000 local authority job cuts, the recruitment embargo and various other schemes (such as paying people to take career breaks) has nothing to do with work life balance. It is about saving money.
Joe’s idea that local authorities can take the hit but the gardai can’t is contradicted by plans to reduce the gardai numbers and also by the fact that in the recent flooding for example it was the Council staff we needed and thanks to some Councils having to cut hundreds of outdoor workers, the Council services were stretched to the limit at a time they were most needed.
Apologies for the duplicate comment there.
@Joanna
Speaking of reduced hours in the public sector, there’s a potential glaring anomaly in the pay-cut announced in the Budget [nod to School Marm over on irisheconomy].
If the rate of cut depends on the notional salary scale point, as opposed to total earnings, then a job-sharer earning say 30k could end up taking a larger pay cut in percentage terms than another public servant on substantial overtime earning a total of 100k.
Say a female civil servant on 60k went on half-time job share to spend more time with her kids, thus earning 30k. If the percentage cut applies to her notional salary payscale point of 60k, it ends costing her 6.25% of actual gross earnings.
Constrast with a prison officer or junior doc with a notional salary of 50k, but who doubles this via overtime. Again if the cut is determined by the scale point not actual earnings, they’d up with a percentage pay cut of 6%. Less that the poor woman on 30k. Hardly fair.
In fact, the civil servant would also be taking a larger percentage pay cut than a minister! (given that 10% of the minister’s supposed 15% pay-cut was in fact voluntarily given up in October 2008, leaving them with a net additional cut of only 5%).
Joanna, you could do the job-sharers of the public service a big favour by pointing this anomaly out to Brian Lenihan via a PQ or some other means.
Thanks Proposition Joe,
Will do. I think that aspect of the budget will be up for discussion next week.
It should be pointed out that the pay cuts on those on lower incomes in the public sector will push some of those in to the category of being eligible for Social Welfare payment Family Income Supplement.
All those people that have highlighted the differential between public and private pay, the pay cuts and the pension levy will have changed that significantly. Is it really a good thing in our society to have more public sector workers eligible for social welfare because there wage is now so low?