Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Does the Taoiseach agree it is no surprise there is such a significant gap between the employers and workers' representatives with regard to pay levels? For 19 years, so-called social partnership has allowed profits, speculation and rents to rise relentlessly and without restraints, while workers' wages in no way matched them. For example, many hundreds of thousands of workers, particularly young workers, find themselves priced out of a home as a consequence.

Does the Taoiseach agree with the general secretary of the country's third largest trade union, MANDATE, which organises 40,000 members in the retail and bar sector, who stated that partnership had condemned thousands of his members to poverty and that, therefore, the union would pull out of this process in favour of launching realistic wage demands?

Does the Taoiseach agree that the obvious difficulty in securing a new so-called partnership agreement also arises from the great pressure felt by trade union leaders from their members regarding the employers' thrust to undermine decent wages and working conditions by exploiting migrant workers? Does he agree this scepticism is well justified, given that in recent weeks the Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union has been obliged to expose a Polish subcontractor and a Serbian subcontractor. These companies, which operated in one of the country's most important industries, namely, the ESB, grossly and cynically underpaid their workers and then victimised them when they sought their rights on union advice. This follows from the Irish Ferries debacle.

I refer to a regime of proposed labour legislation that would destroy collective bargaining and force workers into individual contracts, one by one, at the boss's behest. It would destroy unfair dismissal protection for all workers in places of employment with fewer than 100 workers and amounts to an all-out attack on trade union rights. These are the policies of the Taoiseach's guest, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard. Has the Taoiseach discussed workers' rights with Premier Howard and is the Taoiseach as much in agreement with him on this issue as he is on Iraq?

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