Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

The events of the past few weeks and the appalling treatment of the Vita Cortex, La Senza and Lagan Brick workers and last year the Jane Norman workers, who were treated in a similarly appalling manner, for whom nothing whatsoever was done and who are still owed approximately one month's wages, highlights the inadequacies of the Industrial Relations (Amendment) (No. 3) Bill 2011. It seems to respond to troika demands for so-called labour market restructuring which, to my mind, encourages a race to the bottom in terms of wages and conditions for ordinary workers. It responds to the ideological prejudice of a Government which continuously trots out words like "competitiveness" and "flexibility" as if they were an end in themselves rather than seeing as a priority the rights and entitlements of ordinary workers such as those I mentioned who are being trampled on, in particular in the current climate of recession and austerity in which certain employers seem to take the opportunity to walk all over the rights of workers and get away with things they would not otherwise get away with.

Where are the protections in this Bill to ensure the disgraceful scenes we saw in La Senza or which we are seeing in Vita Cortex and Lagan Brick are not repeated? That reflects the deeper misguided thrust of this legislation. Of course, I welcome the fact that at some level this legislation is about retaining the JLCs and the REAs after they were struck down by the courts. However, it seems clear the Government is under pressure from its own ideological position, from employers' organisations and from the troika to use this opportunity to weaken the protections that existed in the JLC and the ERO systems. Specifically, it is taking the question of Sunday premiums, overtime rates and so on out of the remit of the JLCs. This will be replaced with a code of practice which will almost certainly lead to a watering down of the rights and entitlements workers should have to Sunday premiums and proper overtime rates. In so far as it seeks to bring in derogations for employers from EROs and JLCs, the emphasis is on the employer side rather than on the rights of workers to the protections the EROs and JLCs have provided in terms of pay and conditions.

It is worrying that in setting wages the emphasis is again on competitiveness and taking into account comparable jurisdictions whatever they might be. It is very important to note in this regard that much of the rhetoric on the Government side surrounding its approach to this legislation is about the need for competitiveness thus implying that wage rates are particularly high in this country and that the group of workers these agreements cover have rights and protections which are somehow uncompetitive vis-À-vis our European counterparts. Nothing could be further from the truth. When one takes into account the purchasing power of wages covered by the agreements, one finds that in the hospitality sector, for example, workers in this country have the third lowest level of pay in the EU 15. These are already low paid workers in comparison with their European counterparts and this legislation seeks to give opportunities to employers to diminish the rights of workers in terms of pay and conditions in these areas. That is problematic.

The Government justifies all of this with talk of jobs. Who could disagree with the urgent need to create jobs? There is no evidence whatsoever that reducing the wages of workers who are already low paid does anything other than damage demand in the economy and consequently further depresses the economy and leads to greater levels of unemployment. It is noteworthy that many of our European counterparts, against the backdrop of the current crisis, have protected or even raised minimum wages because they understand that putting decent pay into the pockets of low paid workers sustains demand in the economy. However, this Bill will do further damage.

The fundamental problem is that instead of addressing the core reason we have mass unemployment, which is the decision to bail out banks and to rob ourselves of the investment funds necessary to invest back into the economy to create stimulus and to put people back to work doing important things such as developing industry and so on, we are handing those funds back to bondholders and workers and employers are left scraping for the crumbs which are left in a depressed economy.

The emphasis in this legislation is on the employer side but workers and many employers will suffer if this is the emphasis the Government seeks to take rather than addressing the real root problems of unemployment while at the same time protecting the rights of low paid workers.

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