Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 9 June 2020

Special Committee on Covid-19 Response

Reopening the Economy: Supports for Business

Mr. Danny McCoy:

In terms of social dialogue, from the business community, and internationally, there is a whole new emphasis on moving away from shareholder value to stakeholder value. We have an opportunity in Ireland, where we are more advanced than most other societies on this wave of globalisation, to embrace that. Social dialogue is not social partnership. Social partnership was a centralised wage bargain in industrial disputes. Social dialogue, as the Deputy rightly said, will be about the social services to provide it because the precariousness I talked about earlier is now experienced by people on all income levels. They can see that there are crises and we need an income protection model. The temporary wage subsidy scheme was made up on the hoof. It should have been in place for a crisis like a hard Brexit but we have it now and it is important that we have that conversation. A commission on taxation and social welfare would be one of the first building blocks to make that real.

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