Non-union companies not keen to engage in new collective bargaining system – survey

Three-quarters of companies that do not recognise trade unions do not want to engage with them as part of any new system of collective bargaining brought in by the Government, according to a new survey. Such a system would come on foot of an EU directive and last year’s recommendations of a High Level Group on its implementation.

The level of resistance to engagement found in the survey, which was conducted by the Chartered Institute for Personnel Development (CIPD) and Industrial Relations News (IRN), is almost exactly the same as was indicated in the 2022. This is despite expressions of broad Government support in recent months for measures to substantially increase levels of collective bargaining.

The Government is required to transpose the directive, which obliges countries in which there is less than 80 per cent collective bargaining coverage to establish a framework for greater engagement between employers and worker representatives by November of next year.

The High Level Group, which included union leaders, academics, senior figures from Ibec and the construction industry and Government officials, recommended that “good faith” engagement would be required.

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Discussing the survey results at the annual IRN conference at UCD on Thursday, CIPD director Mary Connaughton said only 4 per cent of non-union companies said they were open to such engagements with trade unions in the future, with 74 per cent, just one percentage point down on last year, saying they were against it.

“So in the main there isn’t much of openness to trying to negotiate on pay within the non-union sector. We’ve seen this before but it indicates the scale of the challenge that working towards the 80 per cent that the EU directive on collective bargaining aspires to is going to be in Ireland,” Ms Connaughton said.

Reacting to the figures, Siptu’s deputy general secretary Gerry McCormack said he was surprised by the suggestion that employers could engage in collective bargaining without the involvement of unions.

“I don’t know what the possibility could be,” he said, “given that the directive is very specific about what collective bargaining is. Collective bargaining is negotiation between trade unions and employers either as groups at national level or on an individual basis; that’s it, there are no exceptions to that. So I think employers are going to have to look at that very closely and they are going to have to consider how we are going to implement a lot of change”.

Also speaking at the conference Ibec CEO Danny McCoy suggested that while the recommendation for good faith engagement attracted a great deal of attention, a proposal for better training in engagement for both sides was potentially more important.

“It sounds like a sop but more training, more sophisticated training for employers and employees,” is key because “we are in a new world and I think in that new world the big concern is going to be AI which is going to be so disruptive and so as negotiators it will be about negotiating with that shift in what capitalism can do.

“AI is a huge challenge and I predict that labour will have a lot less power in a future in which AI is a more major part of work and that’s not good because we’re not just workers and employers ...– we are citizens in a society.”