Union Blames Civil Service Management For Rise In Sick Leave

A union in Northern Ireland has blamed the management in the Civil Service for the increase in sick leave.

NIPSA said they are placing "the full responsibility at the door of the NICS management".

Data from the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NIRSA) revealed that 49.5 per cent of staff had no recorded absence in 2016/2017 "though approximately one in every eight staff had at least one spell of long-term absence lasting around three months on average".

NIPSA Deputy General Secretary, Bumper Graham, said: "After last year's report we raised with NICS management the need to do more to address in particular the level of illness due to anxiety/stress/depression and psychiatric illness. We offered to work jointly to see what could be done, in response we got not only a brush off but were told all that could be done was being done. This is not the case, management continue to make cuts, attack terms and conditions, change how people work and pile on more pressure whilst totally failing to address the route cause of the problem.

"It is time to stop this annual ritual of a witch hunt against civil servants and for the civil service and others to understand that the pressures on civil servants both economic and workplace pressures are the cause with the resultant adverse impact on health and morale. Rather than taking the current approach and being focused on ill-informed target setting I again call on the management to sit down with NIPSA to seek real and meaningful resolutions to the causes of ill-health in the workplace."

(CD/LM)