THE Government's new Bill on working time is a cop out when it comes to dealing with zero hour contracts, the general secretary of Mandate Mr Owen Nulty, said.
He was criticising the "provision in the Act stating that employers will be obliged to give staff information on the hours they should work "where it is reasonably possible to do so".
Mr Nulty said if the Government wanted to outlaw zero hour, contracts in the retail trade it would amend the Shop Acts.
He criticised employers for not honouring their commitments under the Programme for Competitiveness and Work (PCW). In return for pay restraint and industrial peace, the trade union movement had looked for union recognition to be obligatory for firms, but the best that could be achieved was a commitment to "partnership" from IBEC, the employers' organisation.
"We all know to our cost that pious aspirations towards any form of partnership are not worth the paper on which they are written," he told delegates. "Our experience in Mandate has been that many employers, both large and small, at best pay lip service to the whole idea."
In Cork, the Early Learning Centre was a member of IBEC but it had only reluctantly participated in talks at the Labour Relations Commission to resolve a dispute, he said. It was now refusing to submit the case to a full Labour Court hearing.
Mr Nulty said: "We also have the ludicrous situation of employers publicly accepting settlement terms freely negotiated between the parties, or resulting from Labour Court recommendations, and then blatantly and systematically failing to honour their commitments, resulting in complete breakdown of trust between the workers and their employers.
"There is nothing more soul destroying for workers than to accept in good faith a deal and to have the employer renege when the pressure is removed.
"Our member's feel completely let down by a system which seems to reward wrongdoers and unscrupulous employers, with workers left to bear the cost of such wrongdoing, for example the beef tribunal costs."
He also pointed to the situation in the Dunnes Stores dispute, where the strikers had been entitled to social welfare because the company had failed to utilise the State's industrial relations machinery, but the taxpayer had had to "pick up the tab". He called for the Government to "come to grips with these thorny issues" and penalise companies for not observing best business and industrial relations practices.
The PCW was criticised by delegates. One said they had "signed on for pauperism".