New laws will prevent a repeat of what happened in the Irish Ferries' redundancy deal, when the company received State aid for replacing Irish staff with cheaper foreign workers, Minister for Enterprise Micheál Martin said yesterday.
Under new legislation to be published this week, a redundancy panel drawn from the social partners will be established which may request the Minister to refer dismissals to the Labour Court to determine whether they are genuine redundancies or not.
Based on that opinion, the Minister may refuse to pay a redundancy rebate. It emerged last month that Irish Ferries received €4.3 million towards the cost of statutory redundancy payments to more than 400 Irish staff who were then replaced by eastern European workers on lower pay.
Mr Martin said he hoped the new legislation, to be set out in the heads of the Protection of Employment (Exceptional Collective Redundancies Bill), will be enacted before the general election.
He made the announcement at a press conference at which he disclosed details of a new labour standards enforcement agency, aimed at providing greater protection to workers' rights.
The National Employment Rights Authority was one of the measures agreed by social partners in the Towards 2016 partnership agreement. It is being established on an interim basis, pending the introduction of legislation of new employment rights legislation.
The number of labour inspectors is to be increased from 30 to 90 over the course of the year. The inspectors will be based in Dublin, Cork, Shannon and Sligo, as well as in the head office of the National Employment Rights Authority in Carlow.
Mr Martin said the authority, headed by the former commissioner for taxi regulation Ger Deering, will have a range of financial and legal expertise at its disposal.
The current labour inspectorate regime has been widely criticised by unions and support groups for migrant workers as not having "sufficient teeth" to tackle breaches of employment law.
Mr Martin said new employment laws would provide inspectors and the new authority with greater powers, although he was unable yesterday to give a detailed breakdown of the new powers, or what penalties rogue employers will face.
The announcement met with a mixed reaction from Cllr Mick Murphy of the Socialist Party, who first publicly alleged underpayment of Turkish workers by Gama Construction.
The Tallaght-based councillor said he welcomed the new measures but said he did not see anything to suggest there would be sufficient powers to ensure there would not be a repeat of the Gama controversy.
"I haven't seen anything here today to suggest that workers will be better protected," he said.
Labour inspectors did not expose the problem in Gama - it was the workers themselves, he said. "At the end of the day, the publication of the labour inspectors' report on Gama is still in the court, two years later, and the workers have long since returned home," he added.
Mr Martin said the new legislation would give labour inspectors greater "legal competency" and he hoped that such a situation could be avoided in the future.
Siptu president Jack O'Connor said the Minister's announcement represented "an important step" in combating exploitation and maintaining workplace standards. But he said the roll-out of protection of employment standards promised in Towards 2016 was too slow to stop exploitation.
"Urgency is particularly needed in dealing with the growing phenomenon of bogus self-employment and the casualisation of regular employment through the activities of unscrupulous employment agencies."