Talks will take place at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) this afternoon on access to pensions for school secretaries and caretakers.<\/p>\n
More than 2,600 school staff, who are members of the F\u00f3rsa trade union, engaged in strike action for more than a week impacting around 2,000 schools.<\/p>\n
The workers took to the picket lines demanding access to public sector pensions and other entitlements.<\/p>\n
F\u00f3rsa withdrew the strike action on Friday night after an agreement was reached to engage in a process to resolve the dispute.<\/p>\n
F\u00f3rsa said that the key element of the agreement is a Government commitment to negotiate pension entitlements for school secretaries and caretakers that are comparable with teachers and Special Needs Assistants (SNAs).<\/p>\n
The agreement also provides for discussions on other issues including access to bereavement leave and sick leave, as well as the conclusion of a pay deal for caretakers.<\/p>\n
Discussions on the agreement will begin at the WRC this afternoon.<\/p>\n
If there are any outstanding issues, the parties have agreed to have the matters referred to the Labour Court.<\/p>\n
On Friday, Minister for Education and Youth Helen McEntee described the developments as a breakthrough and said she very much welcomed F\u00f3rsa’s agreement to withdraw strike action and enter discussions in the WRC.<\/p>\n
“Both sides must come together with an open mind and good faith without preconditions or pre-conceived ideas of a final outcome,” Ms McEntee said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Talks will take place at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) this afternoon on access to pensions for school…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11504,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[72,176,61,60,174,175],"class_list":["post-11503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11503\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}