Hundreds of community employment (CE) scheme supervisors are to hold a one-day strike on Friday over access to a pension scheme.

The supervisors will join with staff working in organisations providing health and social care services that receive State grant-aid (known as section 39 bodies) at a protest to be held in Dublin on Friday. In addition, section 39 workers are scheduled to take industrial action on February 21st in a dispute over pay restoration.

The rally is being organised under the auspices of the Irish Congress of Trade Union’s community sector committee to highlight demands for “pay and pension justice”. Unions representing the CE scheme supervisors said the strike by about 500 staff was over the Government’s failure to implement a 2008 Labour Court recommendation to give them access to an occupational pension scheme. Siptu official Eddie Mullins said the outgoing Fine Gael administration had invited unions into a talks process last year.

However he said “nobody in Government managed to present any proposals to resolve this long-running dispute”. “This is despite union efforts to present constructive solutions to a problem that has been allowed to fester for far too long, and despite a commitment included in the 2015 Lansdowne Road agreement that progress would be made on this issue during the lifetime of that agreement, which expired in 2018.” “The incoming administration, however it is composed, needs to recognise that there are a group of workers here who need to have the right to an occupational pension, upheld by the Labour Court 12 years ago, fully implemented.”

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