Tom Fleming (Kerry South, Independent)

The proposed Industrial Relations (Amendment) Bill 2011 should have been discussed well in advance with representatives of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the employers' group IBEC. If that had been done, they could have gone through the technical wording in detail, as well as giving written submissions to the relevant Dáil committee.

The vast majority of politicians have no experience of, or competency in the industrial relations area or human resources management. My concern is that in making any amendment to the 1946 Act to conform to the High Court judgment, the amendment framed should not only be within the parameters of that judgment but in its unambiguous wording must also be compatible with the spirit and intent of the 1946 Act. In other words, the most vulnerable 200,000 workers in our society must be protected from a small minority of employers who can exploit them, including non-union members. The amendment must be framed to ensure that the 200,000 workers covered by employment regulation orders cannot have their entitlements detrimentally affected.

Many of these 200,000 workers are not unionised and have nobody to speak out on their behalf. I urge such people to seek union membership immediately. I am calling on the Minister for Finance to reverse the clause in the 2010 budget which removed income tax relief for trade union subscriptions. We tend to forget that in private industry only a minority of the workforce is unionised, leaving a large majority with no professional union representation.

Whereas the motivation behind the Bill is probably benign, unfortunately, we cannot support anything without having a professional input from the bodies previously referred to, in order to ensure that workers do not lose out on anything they currently have.

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