Motion no: 8
Community and Voluntary Sector workers through their jobs strive to raise the living standards and aspirations of the people, finding themselves in positions of influence - providing hope and building resilience across working class communities.
An essential partnership between frontline worker and community - fighting back challenging inequality and injustice.
Implementing and developing programmes for real change, stabilising communities and significantly reducing pressure on already stretched public services.
Community and Voluntary Sector workers currently operate within a system which places minimal value on them as individuals and even less value on the work they complete.
Taking into account the importance of the work completed by Community and Voluntary Sector workers this reality is both unacceptable and unsustainable.
We have a duty to address the increasingly negative working environments and diminishing living standards which community based workers experience.
The call is being made for the implementation of a Strategic Community and Voluntary Sector Forum.
NIC ICTU agrees to work with Derry TUC towards setting up a working group with the purpose of formalising the structures and agreed functions of the Strategic Community and Voluntary Sector Forum.
The C&V Sector Strategic Forum would facilitate discussions between trade unions branch lay activists, funding bodies, relevant government departments and elected representatives.
The Forum will bring senior lay membership Staff Side representatives together with senior personnel from the Department for Communities, Department of Health and indeed the wider HSC to discuss associated issues and future direction of the Community Sector.
Providing a platform to raise issues and seek actions around such things as inequalities in salaries, excessive CEO pay, poverty pay, sub standard contracts of employment and detrimental organisational policies and procedures.
Working towards building in social clauses in all C&V Sector funding streams and bringing to an end the precarious and unstable nature of community jobs.
Public expenditure within the Community Sector must have proper scrutiny with built in accountability frameworks as standard and not seen as just a distant dream.
Community and Voluntary Sector workers deserve better, this Forum can deliver for workers, their families and already disadvantaged communities.
