Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I will first thank my PA, Naoise McTeirnan and David Gibney, who assisted in developing this Bill. The Bill addresses a problem that the Minister of State has failed to deal with. Employers are using the removal or threat of removal of all or some of a deduction at source agreement as a bargaining chip in collective bargaining negotiations.

If the Minister of State had been at the meeting yesterday, he would know the FSU said clearly that through collective bargaining, the bosses can threaten to cut off the deductions at source as a bargaining tool in those negotiations. The major private sector and public sector unions say this is a problem they are facing more often. As pointed out by Deputy Connolly, it is in the EU directive that union busting is an issue. There is direct testimony from workers about how their agreements were targeted when they took industrial action, when colleagues who did not take industrial action had their agreements confirmed. Specific branches of retail companies were able to stop union dues during a dispute. For 18 years, one employer has used deductions at source as a way of automatically putting every employee who is a member of a trade union into arrears by refusing to pass on subscription fees and refusing to implement increases.

The Minister of State has not addressed that. For all his talk of supporting and encouraging collective bargaining, he made no reference to the fact this is being used as a union-busting tactic, or he referenced it only very briefly. In 2017 and 2018, I raised in the Dáil that during the Tesco dispute, the company brought in a union-busting company, Eversheds, which implemented an operation, Project Black, to deliberately cut across the rights of those workers to take industrial action, on which they had taken a vote. The Minister of State cannot claim to support collective bargaining if a major trade union says this is one of the biggest hurdles that unions face when bargaining and the Government then votes down a simple Bill that would remove that hurdle.

The fact is that it is already in law because a Minister signed into law the Employment Regulation Order (Contract Cleaning Industry Joint Labour Committee) 2022, which requires employers to make deductions at source. The Minister of State did not address that. Did that employment regulation order put an administrative cost or burden on employers? Did it put a cost on the Exchequer? Does it cause a constitutional issue? This is already in law and this Government put it there. I do not buy the issues raised by the Minister of State when the Government already has this provision in law.

He said there was no evidence it will improve workers’ rights but the opposite is true. We have direct evidence and testimony from Mandate, the FSU and other unions that this legislation is needed and directly improves their ability to negotiate for better pay and conditions. I am glad the Minister of State, Deputy Richmond, has his union dues paid from his wages. However, I am not glad about how many workers in this country have had their ability to have deductions at source taken away from them, have had their subscriptions not raised to deliberately put them into arrears when unions are not entitled to representation, or have had deductions at source held over them as a union-busting tool when they were negotiating for a better deal.

The Bill reflects a real need to strengthen workers’ rights in Ireland. Ireland has among the lowest trade union and collective bargaining density in the EU. The implications of this are that 42,000 extra people were living in poverty while at work between 2009 and 2021. This Bill seeks to right that wrong and strengthen those workers’ ability to negotiate for something better than poverty wages. The Government is sending a clear message to those workers and I did not think I would hear it from Fianna Fáil or the Greens. People can get a deduction at source for the bicycle scheme but not for being in a trade union subscription scheme. It is outrageous. I am amazed that the Government is not supporting the Bill. I ask the Government to reverse this decision, stop doing the bidding of big business and union busters, and vote to increase workers’ rights and their ability to improve their own livelihoods. It sends a clear message when the Government, in particular Fianna Fáil and the Green Party, stand for improving workers’ rights and providing a decent standard of wages.

The Minister of State said that the definition of "employee" was not clear but we have a definition in the Bill and, in any case, I would be open to an amendment to that. He said the Bill defines the “Act of 1977” as the Unfair Dismissals Act 1977 and we have that in section 8 of our Bill, although he said it is not there. The Minister of State said the Long Title of the Bill refers to “the written notice of the information required under section 6” when the written notice is required under section 5, and I have no problem amending that. These are simple things. The proposal to extend the period of 21 days to 30 or 40 days to facilitate smaller companies would not be an issue for me and I would be happy to have that amended. Deputy Connolly referred to extending the definition of "small businesses" to those with more than 20 or 25 employees. It is a simple Bill and that is why big businesses in this country fear it, and the Government is reflecting that and supporting them on it.

See this speech in context