A petition for equal pay scales for Irish public sector workers has attracted thousands of signatures

The two-tier pay system has caused a lot of anguish amongst public sector workers in Ireland.

A petition urging the Irish government to abolish the two-tier public sector pay scale system in Ireland has attracted well over 2,000 signatures since it was set up earlier this week. The petition, on change.org, is calling for the government to abolish a system that is seen to discriminate against recent and newly-qualified workers in the public sector. Teachers who entered the profession after 2010, for example, are on significantly lower pay scales than colleagues who were teaching before that date. As part of a number of budget cuts at the time – including cuts to the salaries of all teachers – starting salaries for teachers were cut by over 20%. The petition says that the current two-tier system is wrong and is calling for it to be brought to an immediate end, warning that a brain-drain from Ireland is underway due to discrimination against workers starting out in jobs in the public sector. It reads: Starting at the bottom of a single pay scale system is the way the public sector had operated fairly and justly for years. But recently, for the past 5 or so years there has been a significant split, with newly qualified Front Line workers being placed on a completely different and far inferior pay scale that will never reach the original. It means they lose out on well-deserved earnings over their careers while fulfilling the exact same roles as those who earn significantly more. This needs to end now. These two-tier pay scales are damaging the quality of future workers in these vital Front-Line Public Sectors. A brain-drain from Ireland is under way. Many new nurses and teachers, educated and trained in Ireland, go to work abroad in order to secure fair and equal pay with their colleagues. This waste of resources and loss of talent is a direct result of a policy which discriminates against new entrants. Those of us who remain struggle to make ends meet which leads to low morale. After 5+ years of this lower pay, we have had enough of this unjust disparity. You can check out the petition for yourself on change.org here.