Solidarity with the Striking Ambulance Service Workers

The industrial action follows over six years of failure by the HSE to recognise the significant changes in the responsibilities and workload of ambulance workers, refusing to implement the recommendations of the 2020 independent report ‘Roles and Responsibilities Review’. The recommendations in the report include the implementation of enhanced pay scales, which would reflect the increased responsibilities put on these workers in recent years.

Ambulance workers have been instrumental in the transformation of their roles from patient transport to now include significant pre-hospital treatment, achieved through major changes in both clinical responsibilities and operational duties. For instance, the extent of drug-administration by EMT’s and paramedics has increased by over 80%, which has allowed for vital treatment to be administered more rapidly in emergency situations.

The HSE claims the Workplace Relations Commission and Labour Court recommendations, which it accepted, incorporated the findings of the independent report. However, these recommendations also included ‘modernisations’ and re-grading as pre-requisites, which would affect the existing conditions of the ambulance workers, such as their overtime arrangements.

The workers rejected both the Labour Court Recommendation and the WRC proposal, and demand pay recognition without preconditions.

Both the HSE and the government in their response to the strike have hidden behind the state’s industrial relations machinery, ie. the disputes resolution procedure through the WRC and Labour Court as outlined in the Public Sector Agreement (2024-2026). Micheál Martin said he hoped both sides would “enter into the trusted mechanisms that are there to resolve issues of this kind. We have good labour relations machinery, we should use it to try and resolve this.”

It is important to point out that the WRC and the Labour Court are not just neutral arbiters, but are a wing of the capitalist state, and as such reflect its interests. Their objective is not to mediate disputes, but to preserve “industrial peace”, or rather, to undermine the struggle of workers and the militancy of their unions, and to maintain the current balance of power between employers and workers. 

The government and the HSE are using the ‘labour relations machinery’ as a smoke screen to hide the fact that a conscious decision has been made not to compensate these workers for their ever-increasing workload. The HSE could end the dispute immediately through the implementation of the 2020 report, but they are leveraging the established disputes procedures to further attack the conditions of these workers, who are only seeking a pay increase that they have had to wait far too many years for. 

In this period of increasing costs and ever-rising rents, it is clear that the government will wilfully combat any attempts by workers to improve their pay and conditions. This dispute has shown that not even those workers that perform critical services, those that were essential in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, are exempt from this.

Likewise, the bourgeois media has done their best to undermine the workers’ campaign, presenting the dispute as one of stubbornness from the unions, rather than a fight for fair pay. They even parrot slanderous accusations that the workers have abandoned their posts and are using “patients as pawns”. Needless to say, the work stoppage is not the objective or the desire of the workers, but like all workers, they have a right and an obligation to exercise strike action in defence of pay and conditions. It is the government and the HSE that are putting the lives of patients at risk, not the workers.

Despite these factors, workers can’t afford to wait for ‘industrial relations machinery’ to generate another conciliatory deal. But by going on strike, the workers have realised that the only way that they will be able to exert their interests, and force their employer to the table, is through their joint collective action.

Our strength lies in organisation and collective action! Solidarity with the ambulance workers!