Aer Lingus apart, industrial relations at their brightest

THE current quagmire of industrial disharmony at Aer Lingus apart, figures released yesterday suggests that relations between Irish employees and employers have never been more cordial.

The statistics from the Central Statistics Office showed that in the second quarter of this year there were just 300 days lost to industrial disputes.

That may sound high but the action in question was just one day on which 300 workers at one company did not work. The dispute was at the Liebherr crane company in Kerry and it was over pension allocation and the implementation of a ban on overtime.

To put the level of action for the latest period in context, in the second quarter of 2006 there were 1,801 days lost as four companies with a total of 485 workers suffered industrial disputes.

In the second quarter of 2001 there were 19,706 days lost through action taken by 13,099 employees in 44 companies.

However, the period in recent years came in the fourth quarter of 1999. In just three months there were a total of 178,532 days lost to industrial disputes as 32,203 workers in 17 companies protested.

No industrial dispute began during the second quarter of 2007. The dispute at Liebherr had begun in the first quarter.

In total three disputes began or were in progress in the first six months of 2007, involving three firms and a total of 2,097 days lost.

A total of 7,352 working days were lost through strike action by workers across the country last year — the lowest since records began in 1923.

The 1970s was one of the worst decades for days lost to industrial action at 600,000 days.

The number of days lost last year was less than one-third of the days lost in 2005, which the Government attributed to effective mediation by the Labour Court between employers and worker unions.

Figures generated by the British Office for National Statistics and published in March 2007 looked at working days not worked per 1,000 employees in all industries and services.

It compared Ireland, the EU and OECD from 1996 to 2005 and found that there were 57 working days not worked per 1,000 employees in Ireland, compared to 50 in the EU and 42 in the OECD.