Begg: Partnership process facing make or break test

THE Government has been told by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) that its response to the Supreme Court ruling on Ryanair will be a litmus test for the future of social partnership in this country.

In a hard-hitting speech directed at Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who was a guest at the ICTU biennial conference, General Secretary David Begg said it was the end of the road as far as accepting unpalatable measures by employers and the Government.

“We know a government always has a difficulty balancing demands and requirements of the foreign direct investment community with needs of the trade unions and population. The last 20 years we have gone along with that even though we don’t like it.”

However, he said until the Supreme Court ruling on Ryanair earlier this year, there had been a solution in the form of the 2001 and 2004 industrial relations acts which empowered the Labour Court to make binding recommendations on pay and conditions in trade disputes where a company had no collective bargaining arrangements and refused to recognise unions.

However, in the Ryanair case on the representation of pilots, that power was fundamentally weakened by the Supreme Court’s ruling in favour of the company.

Mr Begg yesterday told the Taoiseach the Government would have to act: “In the rarefied atmosphere of the Supreme Court, most of them have never known a hard day in their lives. They don’t understand that the world is not a courtroom. They do not understand for example that it is not possible for the ordinary worker to come into any court and stand up and give evidence. They do not understand the tradition of the trade union movement.

“They have presented us with a situation that this country does not want but we have to confront that situation now because I think honestly we have run out of road in terms of our capacity to accommodate a dichotomy between our role in social partnership and this lack of recognition of our role in terms of the collective bargaining process.”

In a boost to the ICTU and its campaign for equality, however, the Taoiseach announced plans for a Government survey of employment conditions, with emphasis on agency workers.

Bertie Ahern said there are 550 agency companies operating in Ireland.

“That seems excessively high. There is great concern that a lot of these workers are coming in below the normal rates and conditions. If we find that non-national workers are being exploited in the way agencies operate, employers, unions and the Government will need to look again at what is the right balance in regulating employment agencies and agency workers.

“We agreed last week that Micheál Martin and his officials would engage intensively over the summer with the unions to see what we can do. We need to try to understand the figures, but there seems to be a lot of issues around it that are causing a lot of angst and we need to address that.”