Dáil debates

Wednesday, 12 May 2021

Companies (Protection of Employees' Rights in Liquidations) Bill 2021: Second Stage [Private Members]

 

10:30 am

Photo of Bríd SmithBríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for enlightening us on his intentions in the coming period. He said progress has been slow but I want to ask him how slow does he think slow is. What I find interesting is that now that he is in government, he seems to accept the fact that since 2015 when the Clerys debacle happened, there was a recommendation from Duffy Cahill to push up the priority of workers in terms of redundancy legislation in circumstances of liquidation. If he was on this side of the House, on the Opposition benches, he would be kicking and screaming about that, but now that he is in government he has put forward an amendment that kicks the can down the road for another year. We already have a wait of six years and the Minister of State proposes to extend it to seven, yet he has just said that he has no intention of it taking another year. He should amend his amendment and tell us how long it will take to change the legislation to bring workers in this country who are victims of liquidation, often tactical liquidations by companies that buy up companies that buy up companies and want to ditch the legacy of those workers, up to speed with legislation in countries like France, Portugal and Greece, to name a few countries that put workers first in those type of liquidation situations.

That is what the Debenhams dispute has been about. It is about justice, fairness and recognising the role of workers in all that happens in society, whether it is running a shop, a hospital, a school or the public transport service. It is so ironic that they managed to run a strike during the entire pandemic when what was shown to everybody was that workers matter. Their lives, jobs, efforts and labours are at the heart of everything that functions in society and the pandemic showed us that very clearly when we came to rely on the efforts of essential workers just to keep the basics of society going. I do not think it is good enough for the Minister of State to table this amendment, to kick the can down the road and then to say to us that he does not intend it to be that slow. If he does not intend it to be that slow, then he should tell us he is bringing his own Bill before the Dáil next week, like a good Fianna Fáil Opposition backbencher would have done back in the day, but now that he is in the comfortable position of being a Minister of State, he is kicking it down the road. If it is not 12 months, then he should not put 12 months into the amendment. It just does not make sense.

I wish to make a couple of points in addition to all that has been said about this dispute. In his response, the Minister of State said he has been very good about making sure that workers knew what their welfare entitlements and supports were and that they received their statutory redundancy, but I have got news for him. They are not entitlements that are handed down by him, by Deputy Varadkar or by anybody else, they are entitlements that are there for every citizen in the State. The redundancy pot that is there for the statutory redundancy they were paid was funded by them. Many of them had more than 20 years or 30 years of service and they paid their full social welfare contributions into the Social Insurance Fund.

They paid for their own statutory redundancy. It was not some gift from the gods of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael to hand to them, nor was the knowledge of their welfare entitlements or the supports they are entitled to now, in the prime of their life, when they are being dumped on the scrapheap with no options other than a €3 million fund to go back to school. I have never heard anything so insulting to mothers, grandmothers, experienced workers and those who have given most of their lives working in the retail industry, making vast profits for companies, as saying "There you are girls, go back to school." It was a shameful insult. They are voting on it and it is likely that it will be accepted, but it is only because there is nothing else for them. The Government has done nothing for them except to tell them what they are legally entitled to, which they knew anyway. I could have told them that, as a constituency representative of many of them.

The Government should not insult them by saying it has done everything it can. The Minister of State, his party and the Government were dragged, kicking and screaming, by those workers into even meeting them and their unions. The Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, was dragged, kicking and screaming, because he was ashamed of what those amazing women were doing on the picket line in St. Patrick's Street in Cork. The Government has done all it can but all that it can do is not enough.

When we compare how those workers have been treated with how banks have been treated, how industry has been treated, how the bailiffs who were on their heels all the time, KPMG, have been treated by the State, it is quite shocking. In order just to wind up Anglo Irish Bank, which brought this country to a massive collapse, the State paid KPMG €175 million. When we delve down into the role of KPMG throughout the fabric of finance and the secret world of banking and finance in this country, we find they got €11 million to advise us on broadband, a fiasco that ended up costing us more than €3 billion, so they got €11 million for bad advice. They also got millions from banks like AIB, which paid them €50 million for auditing their books between 2002 and 2009, and the audit was so good they told none of us what was coming down the track and that there was about to be a collapse in AIB or, indeed, in the other banks they audited.

There is a different set of rules for those who act as bailiffs, even for the security companies which went in during the wee hours of the morning and broke through the picket lines with the help of extraordinary protection from gardaí. They went in and they pulled women and some men out of those picket lines at a number of stores, and they did that on the basis of the protection provided by this State. Guess what? We were under level 5 restrictions at the time and pandemic public health rules were broken. Ironically, given who will be talking about later and how we are going to regulate them, it was those regulated security firms and bailiffs who actually broke public health guidelines, with the collusion of State forces and with the Garda Commissioner standing over that, but nothing happened. Fines have been issued to ordinary working-class people, particularly youths, throughout the country for breaches of public health guidelines, but nothing for these companies which broke those guidelines and used force to remove the pickets.

Deputies Boyd Barrett and Barry referred to the role of workers. The Minister of State indicated that the Government met and spoke to ICTU and Mandate. That is fine because they are the official representatives of workers in this country. However, when we say that nothing changes except from below, that is true. Slavery would still be a dominant means of trading labour across the globe if the slaves themselves had not revolted. Change always comes from below. Women would not have the vote unless women revolted and insisted on getting the vote. We would not have abortion rights, limited and all as they are in this State, without the big mass movement of Repeal the Eighth. I could go on.

In the case of Debenhams, we would not have had resistance that was persistent, that shone a light on the injustice to workers and that gave us all a sense of comfort and inspiration that we can actually fight back against an unjust system without the efforts of the rank-and-file workers themselves. Regardless of who we speak to in the official trade union movement, at the end of the day, the people who matter are those men and women who are on the picket lines, the grannies, the mothers and the sisters who stuck it out through the wee hours on cold winter nights in order to make sure that they kept the one piece of armoury they had to shine a light on the injustice, namely, the stock that they protected from being taken from the stores by means of their persistent picketing. That was done by them, not by ICTU, Mandate or anybody else. It was done by them. That is why the recognition of those workers is fundamentally important.

The workers were dragged into the High Court by the previously mentioned KPMG, to which this State paid millions and millions. One of them was humiliated, not in her terms, but they attempted to humiliate her in the High Court and issued threats about her behaviour. Think of the resources that have been spent in court and on lawyers and gardaí to protect a company which is imposing an injustice on these workers.

I am talking to a Minister of State whose party has been in government since 2015, although the other Minister of State’s party was not because he was in opposition. The reason this could happen is because they have failed to legislate on the back of the Duffy Cahill report. Those in the Government commissioned the report and got them to come out with a view on liquidations, redundancies and the preferential treatment of workers, and then did nothing. They sat on their hands for almost six years and now we are being told they want to sit on their hands for another year. All I can say is, "Shame on you". The people of this country really need to know what they are doing. They are kicking down the road again and again the rights of workers. As we see more and more connived and contrived liquidations taking place in retail, and the young people everybody has been talking about in the past few days being dumped on the scrapheap of unemployment, shame on them that they are not prepared to act now. The Government should withdraw the amendment and allow the Bill to pass Second Stage today.

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