Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)

That is a fact. That could be the legal situation and once it starts with that legal situation and time passes employers will start employing people under the new conditions: why would they not do so? Then when the Minister tries to bring in his law there will be a huge outcry from employers to the effect that he cannot do so because they are employing people under conditions that are inferior to his law. If the conditions are inferior to the law, perhaps that is the reason for the delay in the Government's approach to this matter.

There is a conflict between the people who sit on this side and those who sit on that side of the House as to the approach that should be taken. The free marketeers in Fine Gael would like to drop the whole thing but the Labour Party is very wedded to it. There is an ideological conflict between them, which is understandable because the two parties claimed prior to the election that they were totally different. Why would there not be ideological differences between them? It would be amazing if two parties which said their ideologies were different before the election suddenly found they had no ideological differences once they got into Cabinet and, if that were so, one of them would have had to have been telling us fibs prior to the election.

By holding off in bringing forward legislation, it is one up for the Minister. The baseline of where we are starting from is zero whereas if legislation was in place, the baseline would be that legislation. Therefore, I am concerned as to what the intentions are in regard to legislation in this respect.

I accept that in most small businesses there is very little paperwork, dealings with unions and so on but a particular feature of 80% to 90% of good small businesses that I know is that there is great cohesion between the worker and the management and they very rarely have recourse to any of the industrial machinery unless there is a major breakdown on one or other side and they often relate to personality issues. In long-established good small businesses, the reality is that the employers know that without committed workers getting a fair return there would be no business because it is much more of a team effort and it is much more based on personal relationships.

In larger and more impersonal businesses, there is a temptation to take a money view because of the sheer number of employees and the personal relationship element is not such a feature. Employees in such businesses can often themselves in a vulnerable situation. An employer employing 200, 300, 400 or 500 employers who can save so much a week, rather than considering the importance of the personal relationships between management and workers because such relationships are not immediately identifiable because they are immediately available, may avail of that opportunity to make a cash saving.

It is funny that it has been said that in the interim period nobody will move to take advantage of the situation. We were surprised that an appeal was not submitted on foot of the judgment. If an appeal had been submitted, everything would be stalled until the appeal was heard and we could then move forward and introduce a Bill before the law was struck down, but we are not in that situation. I was surprised by the naive view that no employers will take advantage of the position now that the wall has been knocked down. I find that strange. I will mention two cases where people tried to circumvent the law to save money on wages. Does the Minister remember the famous Irish Ferries dispute? It certainly was not within the spirit of what we would like to happen here but the question arose of whether it was legal. Aer Lingus also let staff go before hiring them again on less favourable terms. It is not believable that somebody working in a non-unionised operation on a casual basis will be able to argue past legal cases with a powerful employer to defend his or her position if the latter finds an apparently legal means of reducing terms of employment ahead of the proposed Bill. It is like telling somebody who is deeply unhappy about a decision to appeal it to the High Court on a point of law when that person does not know where to find the money to take on a court case. In the mundane world where ordinary people work, it is disingenuous to suggest it is sufficient to rely on verbal contracts.

We propose that the Minister should accept this Bill for now and, once he has had his proposals debated in Cabinet, he can bring forward a better system. The basic premise is to address the weakness in the system as it existed heretofore. Nobody is against change. We all recognise that parts of the system had to be adjusted to the new realities in which we must work.

We are hearing a narrative from powerful business interests that if only they could persuade ordinary workers to take less, our economic woes would be solved. I do not agree with the Cuban solution of being poor and happy while refusing to pursue economic wealth. However, I am also far from believing that the pursuit of wealth and notional increases to GNP creates a good standard of living in itself. I would argue that the Cuban model simply makes everyone poor and I believe in the creation of wealth but it must be fairly distributed. Those who measure the success of a country purely in GNP terms miss the point of why we emphasise economic growth and wealth creation. I am not concerned with how wealthy people may be but I am concerned with how poor they are. I do not begrudge somebody who owns a few million euro as long as it has not been earned at the disadvantage of those who are struggling to make ends meet. If somebody is making money by creating wealth in society, I have no problem with it but if he or she is helping to create an unequal society in which the poor are in the majority, that is the wrong vision. I do not agree with the narrative that as long as the people at the bottom cut their cloth to measure, all will be right with the world. Having worked in the area of job development, I see the creation of employment as a means of bringing improvements in people's lifestyles and giving them opportunities to work within their own communities. I did not object if those who created the jobs enjoyed a reasonable living as a result but the current narrative worries me.

I ask the Government to accept the need for this Bill. It is not unusual when the High Court strikes down legislation that we would deal with the specific point of law that was called into question, which is what the Bill does. The Minister can continue to pursue his agenda of long-term reform. I do not need to give him advice because he has been around this House for a long time but all of us who have had the privilege of serving as a Minister or Minister of State understand what it is like to ask when legislation will be ready. We take it at face value when we are told it will take several months and that we are 80% there after six months. However, the delay arises in perfecting the Bill. Every Government I dealt with in this House failed to deliver on the timeframes for their legislative promises. Having been in the system for a long time, I understand why this happens. It is easy enough to get the legislation to 80% of perfection but the final 20% will drive the Minister mad. It will be over and back and subject to negotiation.

The Government's proposals for industrial reform will be subject to endless negotiations between the Labour Party and Fine Gael and we will wait a long time before legislation comes before this House. The proposals will require detailed debate when we finally receive them and the Bill should not be guillotined. If the Seanad is still around when the Minister manages to publish a Bill, he can figure out for himself how long it will take before it can be passed by both Houses of the Oireachtas.

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