George Lawlor (Wexford, Labour)

I move:

That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the provisions relating to the constitution of joint labour committees, so as to provide for cases where organisations of employers or of workers fail or refuse to engage in consultation with the Labour Court prior to the appointment of representative (employers) members or representative (workers) members, as the case may be; and to provide for connected matters.

With regard to the purpose of the Bill, a system for guaranteed statutory minimum pay and conditions for certain employment sectors was established more than a century ago, in 1909. The purpose was to improve terms of employment in the sweated industries, where pay was chronically low and union representation was either non-existent or inadequate. The purpose was to set up bargaining bodies in low-wage sectors where the industrial actors were insufficiently organised. These bodies could then set binding minimum wages and conditions across the sector. The importance of industry-wide enforcement to prevent undercutting was an essential feature of the legislation. The goal was explicitly to reduce downwards wage competition, where, in the words of Winston Churchill when introducing the first Trade Boards Bill, "the good employer is undercut by the bad, and the bad employer is undercut by the worst".

Since that time, the law has maintained this twin-track approach to collective bargaining. On the one hand, there were sectors where trade unions were able to organise effectively. While collective bargaining was encouraged as a matter of policy, the State did not in those sectors impose the forums in which collective bargaining should take place. On the other hand, compulsory machinery for collective bargaining, through the mechanism of trade boards and subsequently joint labour committees, was reserved for sectors in which existing organisation was very weak or non-existent. Clearly, the representative members were there to represent a particular side. However, under the regulations the power of appointment was always the Minister's, with the right of the two sides of industry being a right to be consulted and to supply names for consideration before the appointments were made. A "representative member", therefore, was never representative in the sense of being an elected representative. He was a member who represented the interests of his side.

The Industrial Relations Act 1946 allows the Minister to apply for a JLC establishment order where "the existing machinery for effective regulation of remuneration and other conditions of employment of such workers is inadequate or is likely to cease or to cease to be adequate", or, "having regard to the existing rates of remuneration or conditions of employment of such workers or any of them, it is expedient that a joint labour committee should be established".

A JLC was to consist of the Minister's appointees, as independent members, plus representative members appointed by the Labour Court being employer representatives and an equal number of representative members who, in the opinion of the court, represent workers in relation to whom the committee is to operate. However, following judicial review proceedings brought a decade ago by the Irish Hotels Federation against the Minister's decision to reconstitute a JLC for the hotel sector, matters now stand on a very different footing. The Minister's statement of opposition to the hoteliers' case asserted that a JLC could not be established or operate in the absence of employer representative nominations. The State argued that the decision to come together under a JLC framework was a matter for the two sides of industry and was not compulsory. On that basis, the legal proceedings were struck out. Therefore, the case ended before it reached the court because of a shared assumption that the non-co-operation of an employer representative body would effectively stymie the appointment of representative members to a JLC. In short, there was an employers' veto.

On this understanding, it follows that, in any sector of industry where there is little or no worker organisation and representation but there is an employer representative body, that representative body can prevent the establishment of a JLC by not turning up to the negotiation table, even though these are the sectors that the legislation has always targeted for intervention. If it is now the law that a JLC cannot be appointed without the voluntary agreement and participation of bodies representing either side, this represents a dramatic collapse of machinery that has been working for over a century and which was aimed precisely at sectors where representative bodies were not to be found. The current situation is that the process of setting up a JLC is stated by the Government to require the co-operation of both sides of industry, so the employer side, if sufficiently organised, can exercise a veto. Our Bill is aimed at clearing away that impasse.

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