How is collective bargaining faring in Ireland? What does the State’s new Action Plan for promoting collective bargaining mean to practitioners? And how does Ireland look compared to other EU Member States? These questions were explored in detail by a panel of industry leaders and experts at the IRN Conference, last week.
John King, the new General Secretary of Ireland’s largest trade union, SIPTU, opened the discussion by stating that the current situation for collective bargaining and the context in which industrial relations takes place “is wholly inadequate, and it needs legislative strengthening.”
While SIPTU and other unions achieve gains for workers in parts of the private sector, “the reality is that it doesn’t cut it for most workers in the private sector, and they are denied the fundamental right … to be able for [their] trade union to bargain on their behalf as equals with their employer.”
He said we “have a lot of talk in our jurisdiction in the context of there being a voluntary system. We don’t have a voluntary system. We have an employer veto system that is bestowed on them by the political system. And that’s the reality.”
Mr King said that amongst our EU peers, Ireland has one of the lowest coverage rates for collective bargaining.
“There is an absolute causal link” between the coverage rate and the ‘employer veto’, he argued. The trade union’s view is that the employers “being given the choice to decide whether their employees can exercise their right to engage in collective bargaining is no longer acceptable and it leads to bad industrial relations between workers and employers.”
The SIPTU leader drew a distinction between the private sector and the public service, state agencies and utilities, where unions have a stronger presence and “collective bargaining works in the context that workers can engage”.
But in a “very large sector of the economy, the community sector, the section 39 sector and so on, it doesn’t really work.” Many of those organisations, he noted, “are providing services for the state to some of the most vulnerable citizens” but the employees are denied the right to engage in collective bargaining.
He pointed to forthcoming research from John Geary and his team in UCD that he said will “absolutely underpin” that workers “want to be able to talk about the conditions under which they work, the work practices, work reform, work innovation, and, of course, issues around their paying conditions of employment.”
Prior UCD research showed that 44% of workers who were not in unions already “would form a union in their workplace if it was deemed that it wasn’t going to bring implications on them from their employer.”
He also raised the Good Employment Bill in the UK that “will provide workers in those jurisdictions with far more rights around collective bargaining and being able to organise than we will have in this jurisdiction.”
“So, not alone, will we be worst in class in the context of our EU peers, we’ll actually be worst in class in the context of our nearer neighbours.”