Unions must not allow Irish Ferries to win the race to the bottom
And they believe, although very few others do, that the circumstances in Irish Ferries are unique to the shipping industry, and have no direct relevance to other companies operating and employing people in this jurisdiction.
While it’s IBEC’s role to give the employers’ spiel, they might also give the rest of us credit for having some little bit of commonsense.
What the workers in Irish Ferries are facing is something called ‘de-flagging,’ which means the company is taking down the Tricolour and running up the flag of whatever country will tell crews they must work all the hours of the day and be paid peanuts for the privilege.
“The company has been left with no option but to take this action in the face of union intransigence over a number of years. The issue now for the trade unions is to decide whether it is better to have several hundred moderately-paid Irish jobs remaining in Irish Ferries or to have no jobs at all,” said Brendan McGinty, IBEC’s director of industrial relations and human resources.
That is precisely the issue, whether in Irish Ferries or any other company, and it is the question every Irish worker is now pondering.
A job - but on what terms? Will the standards of pay and conditions, in the wake of the Irish Ferries dispute, be determined eventually by what foreign workers are prepared to accept?
IBEC can point out that employers here are governed by a substantial body of protective legislation and the second highest national minimum wage in the EU.
It adds, rather piously, that extension of the Irish Ferries model into the broader economy, ignoring these standards and involving direct replacement of Irish workers by cheaper foreign labour, is therefore not something that is desirable or practicable.
Well, it may be something that is neither desirable nor practicable, but it’s certainly something that’s not impossible.
Irish Ferries want to dump 550 workers and replace them with cheaper foreign labour. The fact that 75% of current employees, according to the company, are prepared to take a redundancy package, speaks volumes about the pay and conditions on offer if they don’t.
And the national minimum wage isn’t much good when it is already being used as a stick with which to beat Irish workers into accepting the same conditions as foreign workers.
Mr McGinty has accused “one of the largest unions in ICTU” of posing the greatest threat to social partnership. Unlike Irish Ferries at the moment, he appears to be all at sea. SIPTU isn’t trying to get rid of 550 jobs and replace them with cheaper labour.
I presume he had his tongue firmly in his cheek when he said that in the case of Irish Ferries, the company had sought to engage with its trade unions at every opportunity over the last few years, up to and including the Labour Court.
The company’s regard for the Labour Court can be measured by the fact that it rejected its findings in the current dispute purely on the grounds that the ruling didn’t suit it.
I can’t recall Mr McGinty, or any of his IBEC colleagues, lecturing Irish Ferries for adopting such a scathing attitude to one of our industrial relations institutions.
Had the union been the party to do so, IBEC would have been on its high moral soapbox instantly.
IBEC’s gospel with regard to cost-cutting, certainly in the case of Irish Ferries, is that when the current cost base is excessive relative to their competitors, then it cannot continue to do business without radical surgery.
Surgery in this case involves 550 Irish jobs.
Irish workers are absolutely right to give employers credit for thinking that the job could benefit from the multilingual approach!
TYPICALLY, IBEC wants jam on it. It unequivocally blames the unions for the Irish Ferries debacle, but wants them to commit themselves to another social partnership.
I’m rather puzzled, however, when it maintains that concerns expressed by the trade unions about the Irish Ferries dispute can be addressed within partnership and that reasonable outcomes acceptable to all concerned can be contemplated.
So pressing is the dispute that the Dáil condescended to hold a special 90-minute debate on the situation, although the Government has done a Pontius Pilate as far as a resolution is concerned.
Labour’s Brendan Howlin took a contrary view to IBEC, and reflected the attitude of most people when he said the stability of social partnership had been threatened by the actions of “one maverick” company.
Neither did he accept the Government’s, and IBEC’s, contention that the practice would not apply to any other employment.
Mr Howlin quoted the views expressed on RTÉ’s Primetime by economist Dan McLaughlin. He said there was a view emerging that workers were tools to be discarded at will - but he said that view would not wash with the public.
The ICTU has sanctioned a national day of protest for next Friday over Irish Ferries’ plan to replace Irish workers with cheaper agency staff from overseas.
Protesters will gather at Parnell Square in Dublin city centre at 1.30pm before marching to Leinster House on Kildare Street.
Naturally, IBEC would rather that the country’s workers would not support the protest.
Mr McGinty said it would do nothing to help resolve this “difficult dispute” and would only undermine “our international reputation.”
Would that be the reputation Irish Ferries is trying to label us with as a country where workers are prepared to see themselves forced out of their jobs purely for the sake of profit?
The unions aren’t always right, and are open to certain criticism on the question of foreign workers.
But it is about time they took a stand to protect the rights of Irish - and foreign - workers because that’s the only way to prevent another Irish Ferries, or the euphemistically described ‘outsourcing,’ on a much greater scale than is already the case.
The fact of the matter is that all four ships belonging to Irish Ferries have been out of service since the dispute at the company escalated last week.
If a little bit of commonsense prevailed in the company, this dispute would not have to be so protracted.
Instead of lecturing the unions, or ICTU, it would be more in the line of IBEC to advise the company to engage in talks to have the matter resolved.
