Brazilian workers sought union help over pay issue

A meat factory worker from Brazil says he was being paid the minimum wage for skilled boning work until the trade union Siptu intervened with management on his and other workers' behalf.

A meat factory worker from Brazil says he was being paid the minimum wage for skilled boning work until the trade union Siptu intervened with management on his and other workers' behalf.

"I love Ireland, I love it. It was problems at the start but things are very good now for me and my wife," said the worker, who asked that neither he nor his employer be identified.

Speaking by phone from the factory while on his morning break, the skilled boner and butcher tells how he got the job in 2000 through a recruitment agency in Brazil.

"I came for a better life. In Brazil I was working, not making much. At the start everything was okay."

Soon after he started work at the factory, however, his shifts got longer - starting as early as 6 am and ending at 6pm or 7pm.

Asked whether he was paid overtime, he says: "Maybe a bonus at the end of the week, maybe €40."

He soon learned there was one flat pay rate across the entire factory floor, the minimum wage (then €6.35 an hour), and the union contacted management at the factory.

"The company promised the lads all sorts of things and so they decided not to go the union route," recalls the Siptu official involved.

Promises from the company, however, were not kept and the workers again contacted Siptu.

"The problems were the usual," says the official. "There was no pay differential across the grades and then the lack of sick pay, lack of holiday pay, no overtime rates, no pension plans."

She and another Siptu organiser met a few of the workers in one of their homes and took them through the process ahead of them, stressing the need to increase union membership at the factory.

"You need at least half the workforce to be union members if you are going to have any leverage.

All the Brazilians in the place joined Siptu and quite a few others." There were few Irish people in the factory's workforce.

Once a critical mass had joined, Siptu contacted the company and both parties were soon before the Labour Relations Commission under the terms of the 2004 Industrial Relations Act, under which a dispute will be investigated by the commission when an employer refuses to engage in collective bargaining.

After a few meetings the company agreed to increase pay. Rates at the factory have been altered to reflect skill levels and a workers' committee established following the LRC talks.

The Siptu organiser says things still are "not great, though a vast improvement". Pay rates, she says, remain unsatisfactory.