David Cullinane (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I will support this Bill and will first refer to the provisions I support. I am in favour of collective bargaining and trade union recognition, which is absent from the legislation. I discussed this issue recently with the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Richard Bruton, when he introduced the Workplace Relations Bill. During that debate, the Minister informed me that it would be more appropriate to discuss two of the issues I had raised in the context of this Bill.

Employees should have the right to be legally represented by their trade union. This does not mean yellow-pack collective bargaining or collective bargaining through the back door for employers who do not want to recognise trade unions. It means that employees should have the same legal rights as employers who are in a position to employ expensive barristers and solicitors to represent them. Many companies will not recognise or engage with trade unions, although I accept that the Bill establishes a mechanism to force employers to engage with the industrial relations architecture. While this is a welcome step forward, it does not deliver trade union recognition and, as such, employers will not be required to recognise a trade union. This is an inherent flaw.

The reason workers need trade unions from time to time is that trade union representatives are trained, have a wealth of experience and understand the wide range of industrial relations laws in place. I acknowledge that the Government has streamlined some of this legislation and, by extension, the employment rights bodies. Nevertheless, many workers find themselves in a maze when they try to understand their entitlements, as was clear in recent cases involving workers in Clerys, Dunnes Stores, Vita Cortex, Game, La Senza, Lagan Brick, Waterford Crystal and TalkTalk. In all of these cases, workers were left without proper entitlements as a result of the weak protections and employment rights afforded to them. While the type of collective bargaining proposed in the Bill is a step forward, it still falls short of what is required, namely, collective bargaining and trade union recognition.

The other argument in respect of collective bargaining, registered employment agreements and the entire industrial relations legislation is the weak levels of enforcement and compliance. This has been replicated in the Bill where it re-establishes registered employment agreements and makes provision for the same types of enforcement and compliance mechanisms that have failed until now. It is ridiculous, for example, that an employer may withhold payment from employees. We are all familiar with cases where a trade union has taken a case involving the failure of an employer to pay proper wages. The appropriate employment rights body, whether the Labour Court or Employment Appeals Tribunal, will give the employer a slap on the wrist by ordering him or her to do little more than pay the workers. The lack of penalties and sanctions means there is little to deter employers from engaging in this activity in the first instance. It is akin to someone who is caught in the act as he or she walks out of a shop with groceries in a shopping basket telling the shopkeeper he or she will return the goods and everything will be all right. This is not how the system works. Deterrents are in place to prevent people from breaking the law. This does not appear to be the case for many unscrupulous employers, however, of whom we have seen many examples.

Unfortunately, compliance and enforcement across the industrial relations framework have been weakened under this Government's watch. Resourcing of enforcement bodies is inadequate. The Government has stripped out well established rights that were provided for in the previous legislation on registered employment agreements. These enabled access to workplaces for designated union officials to monitor compliance and ensure employees were protected from victimisation from an employer arising from such visits. The Government has also dragged its heels in addressing the industrial relations vacuum arising from the McGowan judgment. Rates of pay for many workers have hit the floor and their conditions have become intolerable.

It is always difficult to engage in a critique of an extensive Bill of this nature in the five minutes available to speakers. My party was asked by the Mandate trade union to raise a specific issue directly with the Minister of State. The provisions allowing for rates of pay above the minimum wage to be set through registered employment agreements is one thing but workers also want the issue of hours to be addressed. The problem for many workers in precarious employment is that they are on low-hour contracts and cannot move up to what are known as banded-hour contracts. Many of them will work for 30 or 40 hours per week consistently and solidly for many years and yet remain stuck on low-hour contracts. This issue needs to be dealt with in separate legislation and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has proposed a fair hours Bill to address it. Sinn Féin will table amendments on Committee Stage to resolve some of the issues that arise in this regard.

The Bill is good in so far as it goes, for example, in re-establishing registered employment agreements, and its collective bargaining provisions are a step forward. Unfortunately, however, it falls short of what is necessary. This does not mean I will oppose it. I will support the legislation on Second Stage and await what emerges on Committee Stage. I thank the Minister of State for his contribution and look forward to a more comprehensive discussion on the details on Committee Stage.