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

I move amendment No. 22:

In page 18, line 9, to delete "30" and substitute "10".

This amendment relates to the representation of workers on the board of any company. As the Minister knows, I hope the harbour company will be dissolved. If that does not happen and the Minister ultimately decides to keep its structure, the question will arise as to whether there should be an employee representative on the board. The Minister is saying the threshold to be reached to have an employee representative on the board is 30 employees. In the case of our harbour company and I suspect that of others that might well mean ordinary workers would not have a representative on the board because staff numbers have fallen because of an aggressive offensive by the executives of Dún Laoghaire Harbour Company to axe jobs at a time when their salaries stayed obscenely high. As I mentioned earlier, it involves the CEO of a company with about 20 employees being paid €136,000 per year, plus a car and so on, but staff being axed. With this threshold, there would be no worker director on the board. We need people from the shop floor - front-line staff who are saving lives in the case of our harbour - on the board. Many attempted suicides in Dún Laoghaire have been prevented by the harbour police, the numbers of which have been slashed, while the number of maintenance workers has been reduced. These are the people who physically maintain the harbour. If the Minister is to maintain the company structure which I hope he will not, there should be worker representatives on the board and the threshold should be brought down to ten to ensure this would be the case.

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