Jim Walsh (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I second the amendment for the purpose of the debate.

I was not a great fan of many of the JLCs. Most of them came about because of social partnership, which played a significant role in involving unions and workers, employers, farmers and others in the recovery from the economic recession in the 1980s. Social partnership was a strong contributory feature of the growth in the 1990s and the first decade of this century. However, we may have been wedded to the JLCs for too long. In some instances, large employers used these and their representative union bodies to drive up pay rates, which ultimately partly led to uncompetitiveness in the country, but also to prevented smaller, much more efficient operations from competing on a different level. As I have stated on many occasions, we artificially increased rates right across the public service. I have had an analysis done and if one compares public service pay, including our pay and that of the Minister of State, with that of a coterie of western European countries, Ireland is out of sync. That adds to uncompetitiveness which ultimately affects the economy. Everything, including wage rates, should be geared towards competitiveness. We lost sight of that some time during the past decade and when the downturn came, it was a fairly significant issue which led to a lot of pain for employees and, perhaps, was inadequately dealt with. We should not allow ourselves to get into that particular cycle again. Artificially increasing wage rates is wrong and ultimately leads to job losses. Those who suffer in all of this are workers because many will find themselves unemployed.

We need to be careful in the context of the route we are taking. I am all in favour of having a good dynamic between employers and employees and things being fair, but we are talking here about the private sector in particular where some 50% of people do not have pensions. There is a demographic time bomb coming down the road. Young people going into the public service now will be extremely fortunate to get a pension because the State may not be able to pay it down the line at the rate it has been going. We should be trying to broaden it for those in the private sector. As people live longer, the need for pensions will be greater and I would like greater focus on negotiating pensions for those who do not have them rather than giving increases in wages, which may give some short-term gain but are not as valuable. Those who work in a company for 20, 30 or 40 years have an entitlement to some remuneration in their retirement years. We need to review our approach to many of these issues.