Corporate governance - All workers need reliable protections

THE protections offered to workers, especially those in low-paid, vulnerable sectors, is one of the ways a society can be judged.

The difference between the protections offered the most secure workers — usually full-time public employees — and those on, say, a zero-hours contract in the retail sector is another way a society can be judged. That difference, great or immaterial, shows if a society really believes in universal rights or whether it gives patronising lip service to the idea of basic, enforceable rights for all workers.

In Ireland, at least, that gap seems almost unbridgeable, an unfortunate reality confirmed at Dublin department store Clerys last week, when workers were given as little as 30 minutes notice that their jobs were gone. The prospect of such arbitrary and callous treatment of staff in the public service is thankfully unimaginable.

Though some of the workers employed by concession stores at Clerys will not lose their jobs, the majority of the 460 workers at the store were thrown on to the street with little or no respect or dignity, a situation described by Tánaiste Joan Burton as “absolutely despicable”. Ironically, she made that remark in Kilkenny before she presented the Jim Kemmy Thirst for Justice Award to striking Dunnes Stores workers who are locked in dispute with company owners over low-hours contracts and collective negotiation.

The battle between the rights of employers and the rights of workers seems a swinging pendulum. One group dominates for a period, only for the other to grow strong enough to become the dominant partner and then the process starts all over again. The great decline, or banning, of unions in the private sector has slowed that process dramatically and made too many workers vulnerable. The French have dealt with this by constantly extending the Code du Travail, a 102-year-old document now running to something around 3,200 pages about how work must be arranged and how workers must be treated. Its detractors say it is the catalyst for decline and inefficiency, its supporters say it is an essential social contract reining in high-testosterone capitalism. Such a code is, in Irish terms, almost unimaginable. Apart at all from the dreadful impact it would have on the disposition of mega employers Margaret Heffernan and Michael O’Leary, it would make attracting foreign investment here even more difficult.

It does, though, as the Clerys debacle confirms, seem that something must be done to curb the mistreatment of whole swathes of workers. And it may just be that that process has begun even if in the most unlikely place.

David Cameron’s Tory government has said it may end social welfare pay subsidies to workers employed in companies making a profit. In other words, profitable companies will have to pay a living wage. That idea seems entirely justifiable but, tragically, would take something like a revolution to introduce it in Ireland. A good first step would be a government publication listing profitable companies whose workers rely on social welfare income support. This would allow consumers make the kind of informed choices that can actually change society for the better.