Miriam Hamiltonand Robert McNamara, IFUT assistant general secretary

The recommendation concerns a joint claim by IFUT, SIPTU and Unite under the local bargaining provisions of the Public Service Agreement 2024–2026. The relevant bargaining unit covers academic, teaching and research grades across the sector.

The unions’ proposals include measures to address insecure and atypical employment, including the position of hourly-paid staff, alongside a conversion scheme for atypical teaching and academic activity, a researcher career framework, proper rules around fixed-term and specified-purpose contracts, exam marking and assessment payments, an end to term-time-only contracts, and the elimination of non-collectively bargained academic grades.

IFUT deputy general secretary Miriam Hamilton said: “This is a significant recommendation and, on the central question of whether these issues should have been properly engaged with, it vindicates the position the unions have taken from the outset.

“These proposals should not have been shut down before negotiations even began.

“The Labour Court has made clear that the agreement contains no veto over what can be tabled. The starting point is that the parties sit down, examine the proposals properly and negotiate.”

The Labour Court records that the employer had sought approval from the Department of Public Expenditure before engaging with the unions and understood that Department to have a veto over the proposals that could be discussed. The Court found that the agreement contains no such veto and said the parties should engage jointly on whether the proposals fall within the agreed bargaining framework.

The Court went further, concluding that the employer “has not engaged with the Unions in the manner envisaged in the agreement”, and that complexity or implementation challenges were not sufficient reasons to dismiss the proposals without proper engagement. It recommended that the parties re-engage at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC).

Ms Hamilton said: “That finding matters well beyond the technicalities of this particular claim.

“For too long, unions have been told that issues cannot even be discussed because somebody elsewhere in the system has already decided they are off the table.

“That is not collective bargaining.

“The Court has drawn an important distinction here. The Department of Public Expenditure has a role in verifying costs and policy impacts before finalisation. That is very different from exercising a veto at the outset over what workers and their unions are allowed to negotiate.”

Ms Hamilton added: “No more shutting down bargaining before it starts.

“Let the unions table their proposals. Let employers test them. Let both sides cost them, challenge them and negotiate them.

“Then let us see whether agreement can be reached.”

IFUT said it will now seek immediate re-engagement under the auspices of the WRC in line with the Labour Court recommendation.

Ms Hamilton said: “For the best part of two years, this process has been frustrated and delayed while unions were prevented from getting into the substantive bargaining that the agreement was supposed to provide.

“The Labour Court has now made clear that this was not how the process was intended to operate.

“It is time to get on with it. Local bargaining was meant to provide a means of dealing with real sectoral issues. In higher education, one of the most urgent of those issues is precarious employment.”

Ms Hamilton said the unions’ priority would remain the substance of the claim:

“This is about real people and real jobs.

“It is about hourly-paid staff, researchers moving from contract to contract, people working on insecure or atypical arrangements, and staff trying to build sustainable careers in higher education.

“We now want to get down to the work of negotiating practical improvements in those people’s working lives.”

The Labour Court has separately referred the dispute over the value of the available 1 per cent local-bargaining allocation to the Joint Implementation Committee for clarification.

The original calculation provided to the unions valued the 1 per cent at €8.07 million and was based on basic pay. The figure was subsequently reduced to €5.7 million using core recurrent funding as the basis of calculation, despite the agreement expressly referring to basic pay costs, including allowances in the nature of pay. The Labour Court has now referred the interpretation of that provision to the Joint Implementation Committee for clarification.

Ms Hamilton said: “We do not accept that a figure originally calculated at more than €8 million on the basis of basic pay can simply be revised down to €5.7 million by applying a different methodology.

“The agreement refers expressly to basic pay costs. The Labour Court has now referred that question for clarification and we will be pursuing it.

“The funding question still has to be resolved and the substantive employment proposals still have to be negotiated. But one significant obstacle has been removed: the idea that the bargaining process could simply be stopped at the gate before the proposals were ever properly discussed.”

Ms Hamilton said the recommendation also spoke directly to the wider breakdown in confidence in public service industrial relations: “This is precisely the kind of experience that has driven the breakdown in trust we have seen across the public service.

“Workers should not have to escalate disputes simply to secure the right to have an agreed bargaining process honoured.

“The Labour Court has now pointed the parties back towards proper engagement.

“We intend to use that opportunity constructively, and we expect the employer side to do the same.”