Today, IFUT takes the fight against precarious employment to the Labour Court.
Our delegation is before the Court today pursuing the outstanding Local Bargaining claim from the Public Service Agreement 2024–2026.
This claim is about the reality of working life for too many people in higher education: hourly-paid teaching, repeated fixed-term contracts, insecure research careers, term-time-only contracts, Teaching Fellow grades without proper progression, unequal exam-marking arrangements and the absence of clear routes to secure employment.
IFUT members made a deliberate choice to use the Local Bargaining process to tackle these structural problems. We could have pursued a simple additional pay award. Instead, members mandated us to use this opportunity to improve the position of colleagues experiencing some of the greatest insecurity in the sector.
We have engaged at institutional level, through sectoral negotiations, the Joint Implementation Committee and the Workplace Relations Commission. Agreement was not reached. Today, we are asking the Labour Court to help break that impasse and get meaningful negotiations moving.
If you are a researcher, hourly-paid lecturer, Teaching Fellow or other higher education worker living with insecure employment, these are not abstract industrial-relations issues. They are your pay, your contract, your career and your future.
And they change when workers organise together.
That is what a union is for.
#IFUT #HigherEducation #PrecariousEmployment #TradeUnions #CollectiveBargaining #ResearchCareers