A changing world of work over the past 40 years

A great deal has changed about the world of work over the last 40 years and the recently retired former deputy chairman of the Labour Court Caroline Jenkinson has seen it all unfold

As the Labour Court’s deputy chairman for 22 years, and the head of employee relations and social policy at Ibec for 20 years before that, Caroline Jenkinson is in a unique position to reflect on how much the world of work has changed in just four decades. “The single biggest influence has been legislation and, specifically, the 40-odd pieces of employment law that have come into force during this time,” she says.

“When I joined Ibec in 1977, collective bargaining was the primary means of regulating pay and conditions. Now, so much is determined by law. In 2000, over 80 per cent of the cases dealt with by the Labour Court were industrial relations disputes. The latest figure is about 30 per cent and most are individual cases. That’s a massive change in 20 years,” says Jenkinson, who studied psychology at UCD as an undergraduate and followed this up with qualifications in personnel management, employment law and professional arbitration.

Another significant change Jenkinson has witnessed is the reduction in days lost to strikes. In 2000, there were about 100,000 days lost; by 2020, there were 21,000.

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“By and large people don’t go on strike the way they used to because they simply can’t afford it,” she says. “People’s overheads, between mortgages, childcare and cost of living expenses are huge and strike pay from a trade union would be very small. They can’t afford long-running disputes. Instead you get more targeted action such as one day strikes.”

Relationships between employers and employees may still go sour, but an evolution in how employers view their workforce has helped mature the relationship between them.

“People are now seen as a valuable asset. Companies are prepared to look after them, and to train and retrain them as necessary in a much more invested way,” Jenkinson says. “This has led to new practices such as formal onboarding instead of someone telling a new recruit to ‘go sit by Nelly and learn from her’ as it was in the past.

“There’s a lot of talk now about companies looking after employees. But we had our own trailblazers in this respect such as Guinness, the Kerry Group, CRH and the ESB, which was the first to offer an employee assistance programme.”

With new rules on gender equality pay coming down the tracks, Jenkinson is watching how this will unfold with interest.

“I think it’s worth saying that just because there are new rules doesn’t necessarily mean there’s pay discrimination going on, but it’s likely we will see some cases once people realise the implications,” she says. “However, we have had our own equal pay legislation — nothing to do with the EU — since 1974 and when I joined the court in 1998 quite a number of equal pay claims came across my desk at the time. But in latter years it’s rarely come up.

“The majority of the cases being taken related to other gender-related equality issues. It will take a while before the full implications of gender pay equality are seen because while there will be an onus on an employer to publish information on their website, there won’t be any sort of central and reporting for at least another year.”

EU directives have been largely responsible for the increase in employment legislation and Jenkinson is 100 per cent behind the benefits accruing to employees. However, she adds that as the body of legislation has grown, so too has its complexity. Ironically, this has made it more arduous and potentially costly for individuals to take a case.

“In the past, the trade unions and Ibec brought the majority of the claims to the court and did, and still do, a very good job of representing their clients. But there’s been a change and there is far more representation now by legal counsel. This is reflected in the jump in the number of law firms dealing with employment law alone while it’s become a major part of their practice for many others,” Jenkinson says.

“We shouldn’t be surprised,” she adds. “You’re going to have a lot more lawyers if you’ve got a lot more law. However, this also makes it much more difficult for someone to be legally unrepresented at the court.

“The court will always try to facilitate an unrepresented party, while obviously not being an advocate for them, but the complexity of what may be involved is challenging in areas such as establishing the burden of proof or getting the timing right when taking a claim. If someone doesn’t have their claim in on time, they can apply for an extension if they can show reasonable circumstances to the court but these are not easy processes to navigate and in some cases the compensation the court can award is strictly limited.”

Jenkinson is officially retired but she remains busy and keeps in touch with what’s happening in the world of work through her board roles with HR tech company, HR Duo and Stratis Consulting.

“I’m still very interested in the whole area of employment and these are exciting times as there is so much coming down the tracks that employers are going to have to deal with ,” Jenkinson says. “Apart from the gender equality pay information act, there are also the amendments to the protected disclosure legislation which is going to have huge implications for employers while statutory sick pay is going to be a major issue for smaller companies.”