Defence Forces to start recording personnel's hours
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Military management will for the first time start recording hours worked by personnel through a pilot project starting next month.
RACO, which represents 1,100 officers in the Defence Forces has welcomed the news, but has cautioned that the project, which starts on December 1 in three units, needs to become permanent and rolled out across the entire military.
It says excessive hours are being worked by many officers. Some who are “double and treble jobbing” to fill gaps in units are putting in up to 70 hours a week.
They don’t get overtime because up to now there has been no official logging of hours worked. A ‘climate survey’ of RACO members showed 83% maintaining they should be able to earn overtime.
In particular, non-adherence to the terms of the EU Working Time Directive (WTD) within the Defence Forces is causing serious concern to RACO members.
They’re calling on the Department of Defence to define the hours which should be worked by officers in any given week and remunerate them properly for any additional hours they do over this.
Former Minister for Defence, Simon Coveney, said he was close to announcing the introduction of the WTD for the Defence Forces, but this has yet to happen. RACO wants his successor Micheál Martin to implement the WTD immediately.
Members of the Defence Forces are concerned that the department will try and "dilute" the WTD by seeking a number of exemptions to it for the country’s military.
The RACO climate survey has also highlighted that several young officers who joined the Defence Forces from 2013 on don’t see the military as a lifetime or even 20-year career as pension entitlements were reduced by the government 10 years ago and 79% of young officers have signalled they would, in their 40s, have to seek employment elsewhere to improve their financial circumstances come their retirement.
Mr Martin was supposed to address the RACO conference in Tullow, Co. Carlow, on Wednesday but in his capacity as Minister for Foreign Affairs he will be in the Middle East to hold discussions about what is happening in Gaza. His place at the conference will be taken by Jack Chambers, Minister for State at the Department of Transport.