THE Minister for Labour Affairs, Ms Eithne Fitzgerald, has rejected criticism by the Irish Business and Employers Confederation that the new Working Time Bill is too inflexible.
IBEC has said the proposals to restrict the working week to 48 hours will damage productivity, competitiveness and investment.
However, Ms Fitzgerald expressed surprise yesterday at the criticism. She said that IBEC and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions had been fully consulted on the proposals.
The ICTU assistant general secretary, Ms Patricia O'Donovan, said "IBEC criticisms simply do not stand up. This directive has been in the pipeline for five years" and there had been full consultation.
It is important to remember that the directive is a health and safety measure designed to protect workers from the risks involved in working excessive hours". She said that Ms Fitzgerald should "ignore whingeing by employers" on this issue.
Ms Fitzgerald expressed particular concern at IBEC's championing of the "opt out" clause. The EU directive on Working Time allows national governments to include a clause in their legislation which would permit individual employees to agree to work more than 48 hours.
Ms Fitzgerald said this was "very much against our tradition of free collective agreement. It could lead to undue pressure being put on individuals.
"If we went down the road of individualised contracts it would he against the whole spirit of social partnership, which has served this country so well."
In practice she felt that an "opt out" clause would be extremely bureaucratic and unwieldy.
The Fianna Fail spokesman on labour affairs, Mr Tom Kilt, has called on Ms Fitzgerald to publish the Working Time Bill as a matter of urgency. With five weeks to go before this directive is due to be passed into Irish law, it is totally unacceptable that we are still in the dark with regard to the Minister's thinking", he said.
He expressed concern for workers in some industries where long hours were the norm. He said it would be totally unacceptable if" they lost out as a result of the legislation.
The Dublin Green MEP, Ms Patricia McKenna, also criticised IBEC yesterday for its opposition to the Bill. She asked how IBEC could claim that it wanted to reduce unemployment and oppose legislation that sought to limit people's working hours.
"At the moment there are two extremes of working conditions in the EU. Between 18 and 20 million people have no work and millions of others are stressed out because they have too much. Surely some balance must be struck."