The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) says it received assurances last week from Taoiseach Simon Harris that a key EU directive on employment rights will be transposed into Irish law by the November 15th deadline but the organisation remains concerned about the extent to which the measures involved are to be legislated for, according to its general secretary, Owen Reidy.
An important provision of the adequate minimum wage directive, which is intended to reduce working poverty and inequality, is a requirement that governments promote collective bargaining but unions and employers have expressed starkly different views on what this might entail.
Mr Reidy says Ictu would report the Government to the European Commission in the event it feels Ireland is in breach of its obligations in relation to the directive, which is due to be transposed into Irish law by November.
He said he hopes to clarify the Taoiseach’s views on how the directive, which he has described as the most exciting piece of employment legislation in 20 years, will be transposed at a proposed meeting over the coming weeks.
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“I’m still very excited and optimistic about this directive but I am concerned that I don’t sense that same sense of excitement and optimism from the Department of Enterprise and Employment,” he said.
“Ibec’s public stance on it has been that there’s ‘nothing to see here’ but we are very clear about the actions we believe are required by this directive and are frustrated by the lack of certainty from Government on it. We have had assurances the directive will be transposed but no agreement on how that will happen.
“If the Government falls short, that won’t be the end of it from our perspective; far from it,” he said. “Employers have been banging on about the cost of doing business but the Government needs to remember there are two sides to the labour market.”
The directive is seen by the union movement as having the potential to significantly boost its recruitment efforts in the private sector, where fewer than one in five workers is a trade union member.
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Ictu and its affiliates have been running a public campaign entitled Better in a Trade Union in recent months to raise awareness of what they see as the benefits they can offer to workers, and there will be a number of workplace recruitment events this week to coincide with May Day.
The campaign is understood to have involved a spend of about €300,000 by the unions and the intention, said Mr Reidy, was to follow it up with research on any impact it may have had regarding the perception of unions among the population.
“It’s not that we expect to have this campaign and then tens of thousands people are going to run to join a trade union,” he said, “but the hope is that it will raise awareness of what we do and we will go back and look at how well that has worked afterwards.”
Union membership across the island, he said, had increased by about 15,000 in the past year, driven in part by public sector disputes in the North, but Mr Reidy acknowledged that the percentage of workers in the private sector who were members had slipped steadily due to substantial rise in the number of people in employment and a failure to match that on the recruitment front.
“Research shows that a lot more people, particularly young people, would join a union if they had the option. The demand is there but we are not being allowed by many employers to meet it. The is one of the reasons proper transposition of the directive is so important for us,” he said.
“We are pushing for that in the South and an employment Bill in the North, so it’s two sides of the same coin.”
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