Mick Barry (Cork North Central, Anti-Austerity Alliance) | Oireachtas source

We will be voting in favour this Bill on Second Stage. We believe it can improve the ability of unions to more fully function in workplaces where they have a membership base. We believe it can be a useful tool against union busting. When we think of union busting, we think of the United States of America where it is a multi-billion dollar industry. We think of companies such as Walmart, Coors, Coca-Cola and so on, but we also have union-busting in Ireland. It is nothing new. We all know about 1914 and William Martin Murphy, but we have a modern brand of union-busting too, and we see that very clearly currently in Tesco where union officials have been banned from the premises.

The Minister made an interesting point. She conjured up a picture of 56 different unions trying to get in the front door, the back door and perhaps wriggle in the window also in order to try to unionise companies which might have two, three or four people working for them. What about a company that has 12,000 workers and where there is not a single union official allowed on the premises? Where is the famous balance in that situation? This is a company from which unions are banned from putting their notices on notice boards and from holding meetings on the premises, such as in a canteen. It is a company which rips up the contracts of its longest serving staff members without their consent and which engages in intimidation. Let me be quite clear, this is happening on a nightly basis at present. Workers, an hour before they ballot on whether to strike in their shop, are being called in by managers and told that if they do not have contracts, they will not work there again if they vote the wrong way. If they have contracts, they are being told that they will see their hours being cut if they vote the wrong way. What we are seeing is a campaign of economic terrorism by a corporate giant against working men and women in this country. It is happening right under the Minister's nose and she is refusing to support legislation which would assist those workers. That is shameful.

The UK law firm Eversheds Sutherland now has an Irish wing. The lawyers in that firm have been the top union busting advisers in the UK for nearly 20 years, and they are working with Tesco. They deny that they are involved in union busting in Ireland, but it does take a rocket scientist to work out what is going on. In terms of politics, the number of union busting companies in the United States grew from approximately 100 to a figure in the thousands in 1980s. Such firms seem to be getting a foothold in Ireland under Fine Gael's watch. In the US, the union busters flourished under Reagan. Are they now going to gain a foothold in Ireland under Fine Gael?

Fianna Fáil deserves mention as well. We talk about foreign direct investment, FDI, companies, but that party is protecting precisely those companies that come from a union busting culture in the United States and their right to try to deny the union rights of Irish workers. When Deputy Donnelly joined that party a few weeks ago, he talked about joining a party of republican social democracy. I do not see much of that on show in the debate tonight.

There is a need for legislation to outlaw what Tesco has done in stopping the check-off of union dues on its workers' payslips. There is also a need for mandatory union recognition to complement that legislation. We will table amendments on Second Stage but the Bill is a positive step and we will be voting in favour of it this week.

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