WTF - Secretary From Limerick Earning €6.02 Per Hour

Irish Examiner wrote:

The conference heard the plight of one Limerick secretary who started working for a school eight years ago. At that point she was earning €225 for a 37.5-hour week — an hourly rate
of €6.02. According to the union, eight years later that woman is still earning the same wage — now almost €3 less than the minimum wage.

Article Here

I'm so outraged, I'm speechless...

There are very many underpaid women clerical workers. In the last 10 years the proportion of women working in Ireland has much increased, but the wage gap between men and women has widened.

The World Economic Forum annual Gender Gap Report 2007 is a bit of a blunt instrument but it broadly captures the position of women in Ireland in terms of gender equality.

LINK TO REPORT

In 2007, Irish women ranked number 1 in the world in terms of educational access and attainment, but only 44th in terms of wage equality. No coincidence that we also rank 44th in the world in terms of legislative and managerial roles. We are 74th in terms of Parliamentary representation but our political ranking is bumped up due to having had a female head of state (their figure is wrong on this). We are therefore given a very generous ranking of 8 in politics - does anyone feel this reflects reality?

We rank only 60th in health and life expectancy equality, lower than any other european state.

(page 85 of the report gives a summary for Ireland).

2 min interview on Report

Ireland's gender equality as measured in this report has improved in terms of the overall basket of factors that are considered by the Forum. To me, health, earnings and political empowerment come pretty high up in what makes for quality of life, so I wonder how much the overall ranking really reflects gender equality in Ireland. Are we picking up brownie points for having a female President and having a lot of good legislation on the books whilst in the things that matter to people the picture is quite different ?

Many European countries hold privileged spots in the Gender Gap Rankings 2007. Fourteen of them—the five Nordic countries, Germany, Ireland, Spain, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Belgium—hold places among the top 20 positions. Germany, which held 5th place in last year’s rankings, has fallen behind New Zealand and the Philippines. All three countries have shown improvements in their economic participation ratios but larger absolute increases in the Philippines
and New Zealand put these countries in 5th and 6th positions respectively, while Germany falls to 7th place.
Ireland (9) and Spain (10) outperform the United Kingdom (11) which previously held 9th place. Their superior performance is driven by increases in economic participation and political empowerment indicators, notably in Spain, which ranks 5th among the 128 countries covered on political empowerment—it has 36% women in parliament and half of all those in ministerial positions
are female.

Belgium, Costa Rica, Ireland, Korea, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden closed their respective gaps by over 10% of their initial values in 2000.

The law is fairly clear on this. That person has legally enforceable rights. There is no need to get angry when you can get even. The fact that the minmum wage exists should mean that Mandate cannot cite this as a complaint to justify strike action. How can one strike for rights you already have?

There have been great employment opportunity for secretarial staff over the last few years. Those school secretaries who are not being paid properly should work less hours or get jobs elsewhere. It is hard to understand why somebody would have stayed working for so little. They are either bound by a sense of duty or they are just lazy. I expect that there are cases of both.

I have to say that I am glad that the Government is not paying for the new ones directly. It is better that the schools are given the money so they can engage somebody to work less hours or somebody with lesser qualifications if that is all that school needs.

With all that said, the headmaster of that school should be ashamed if that secretary is in reality working 37.5 hrs per week. It is very wrong to exploit someone's goodness in that way.

EDIT: On Cactus Flower's point about gender equality, it is good to see a woman pointing out that the struggle for real equality is not over by a long shot. There are too many Uncle Tom women who decry feminism as a dirty word.