Labour law September 22, 2017
Posted by Tomboktu in Employment Rights, Labour relations.add a comment
A while ago, in an e-mail conversation with a barrister acquaintance of mine, the question was asked about what the longest act in Irish law is. He did whatever barristers do with their legal databases and came back with two answers: the Taxes Consolidation Act 1997 or the Companies Act 2014, depending on how you measured the length of an act. The main metrics he cited were the number of sections in the act and the number of pages. And, he added, you could get a different answer if you included the schedules in acts. The tax law has 1,104 sections and the companies one has 1,448 sections. A third possibility I would have suggested before he checked is the social welfare legislation — a quick check on the Internet tells me the current main piece of legislation is the Social Welfare Consolidation Act 2005 — but it’s a minnow in comparison: 364 sections.
Of course, today none of these is a standalone act any more. Each of them has accrued deletions, insertions, and rewordings as amending legislation has been passed over the years. But each has a ‘core’ document that you need to start with you have reason to check something.
I was reminded of that fact when I saw the RTÉ headline about a bill on zero-hour contracts. The areas of tax, companies, and social welfare are each complicated systems, but despite the diversity of internal pieces — for instance: income tax, transactions on land, capital gains tax, farming and market gardening, profit sharing schemes, etc. — each constitutes enough of a whole, of parts that belong together, for our governments over the years to put the law on each of them into a single, albeit lengthy, act.
Not so that system which affects the daily lives of the bulk of people in the State: paid labour. It’s not that we don’t have labour laws — we do, but they’re scattered and piecemeal, with separate, standalone acts for each micro-issue: one act for part-time work, another act for fixed-term work, and yet another for working time; one basic act on the establishment of trade unions, and a different act governing how they exercise their roles in society and the economy. (The act that governs wages? Which aspect: payment of, national minimum, agricultural, for merchant seamen?)
There are plenty of laws on paid work. In fact, a schedule in the Workplace Relations Act lists 20 other acts as “Employment Enactments” (and a series of other acts that contain pieces within them that are regarded as part of the corpus of “employment enactments”).
There would be challenges in collating all of the provisions in the scatter of acts (and regulations implementing EU employment laws) into a single document. It would bring to the surface diverging concepts and applications. For example, there are at least four different provisions on victimisation or penalisation — and both terms are used, although the basic concept is the same — with details on the content that differ in a way that does not seem to be based on any underlying logic. But a more fundamental problem is that despite its heft, our employment law is not intended to be a creative or constructive system that defines and sets the boundaries on the key institution of paid labour for an employer. Rather, it is a hodge-podge of responses to problems that have not merely arisen with paid labour, but which have also then been named and recognised — with struggles and violence, as the early history of trade unions demonstrates. No, the problem with labour law is its starting assumption. Deep in the bowels of the philosophy underpinning employment law is a fiction that employment contracts are contracts between equals and that employment laws are needed only to regulate the bits that have ‘gone wrong’ (and have been proven to have gone wrong). Putting all of the sticking plasters for those ills in one act might reveal just how frail that underlying philosophy is.
Worker directors July 24, 2012
Posted by Tomboktu in Business, Ireland, Labour relations, Workers Rights.2 comments
One of the disdvantages of using Enlgish as our ‘lingua franca’ in Ireland is that we are not exposed often enough to ideas from outside the English-speaking world. A report published last week by TASC, Good for Business? Worker Participation on Boards (PDF here), is a case in point.
The existence of worker direstors in companies in Ireland — and the rest English-speaking world to which we so often look for policy examples — and the legislation on this issue are so poor that it can easily be forgotten that not only is it normal practice in many other European countries, but actually a legal requirement in some of our fellow EU member states. The poor situation in Ireland means that it is a difficult task to undertake a study of the role and effect of worker directors in Irish companies. The sample of companies is tiny and utterly unrepresentative: in the commercial sector, worker directors exist in only a handful of state-owned companies. (Worker directors also exist in a wider range of non-commerical public bodies, although that terminology is not always used to refer to them. Examples include the vocational education committees, the National Disability Authority, and the Legal Aid Board.)
It is worth setting out some of the legal requirements in those other EU countires. In Germany, depending on the size of the firm, either one-third or half the seats on the board must be worker representatives — worker directors or their nominees; in Sweden, a company with 25 employees must have worker directors; in Austrian PLCs regardless of the size of the firm, workers have a right to a third of the seats on the board. Across the EU 27 and Norway, 12 countries provide for worker directors of some form in private forms. The little-known directives on EU-level companies also provide for worker directors.
The TASC report presents a literature review and data drawn from a focus group with nine worker directors from six companies and thirteen interviews with other people: non-worker directors, company executives, and “independent experts”. We are not told what the basis of this last group’s expertise — or, importantly, the the view that they are independent — is.
In Ireland, we are a long way from the kind of values that are reflected in the 12 other EU countries. Two details from the TASC report show how much of a hill we have to climb.
The first detail is that the five recommendations in the report do not include anything would lead to an extension of the model to be extended outside the public sector. I would have thought that this is the kind of idea that a progressive think tank should be introducing into the debate in Ireland. And the report contains a reference that shows why ding that at this time would be opportune. In discussing the legal roles of comapny directors, TASC uses not the current legislation but propoals from a draft companies bill that is expected to be introduced next year. That bill will be a massive overhaul of the Companies Acts — the draft proposals come in at over 1000 pages. (The scale of what is comming doen the line for the TDs and Senators can be seen in the time the preparation of the bill has taken. The Company Law Reform Group has been working on this for over a decade.) TASC should be calling for that process to be used to strengthen industrial democracy in Ireland.
The second detail is that a majority of the the interviewees in the study — that is, the non-worker directors, the company executives and the “independent experts” — believe that worker directors should not sit on remuneration committees. That mind-set, which sees executives as being in a different market from others — so different that it often looks like they are on a different planet — is one of the key factors that has contributed to the obscene income inequalities we see in Ireland and the rest of the English-speaking world.
Garda body seeks trade union rights July 20, 2012
Posted by Tomboktu in Human Rights, Labour relations, Trade Unions.43 comments
[Cedar Lounge Revolution isn’t a news site, but it looks like we may be the first to report on a development that has been made public in recent days. I haven’t seen this reported in any news media, and I coudn’t find any reference to it in searches, including on the GRA, AGSI and EuroCOP websites.]
A legal compalint has been lodged against Ireland for its refusal to allow members of An Garda Síochána join a trade union.
The complaint has been brought under a human rights charter at the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe.
The European Confederation of Police (EuroCOP) lodged the legal challenge in June with the European Committee of Social Rights (ECSR), a parallel structure to the European Court of Human Rights. The legal challenge was made public by the ECSR on Wednesday.
The Garda Síochána Act 2005 states that “a member of the Garda Síochána shall not be or become a member of any trade union”. It allows gardaí to form staff associations without full trade union status. The two main bodies established for that purpose are the Garda Representative Association (GRA) and the Association of Garda Sergeants and Inspectors (AGSI)
The document initiating the legal challenge states that the staff associations do not have access to the Labour Court or the Labour Relations Commission. “The police associations are not allowed to join an umbrella organisation such as ICTU. This means that the police organisations are kept out of the overall negotiations that ICTU conduct on behalf of their members, such as those on salaries”, EuroCOP says.
The Irish law is alleged to breach three articles of the Revised European Social Charter: the right to organise, the right to bargain collectively, and the right to information and consultation.
The case is being taken by EuroCOP on behalf of the AGSI because complaints against a state must be taken by a European organisation registered with the Council of Europe.
http://www.coe.int/T/DGHL/Monitoring/SocialCharter/NewsCOEPortal/CC83_en.asp
Event: Alternative Economic Development Models March 5, 2012
Posted by Tomboktu in A co-op bank, Community, Development, Economy, Labour relations.2 comments
ALTERNATIVE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MODELS: A CO-OPERATIVES & SOCIAL/COMMUNITY ENTERPRISES FORUM
April 23rd, UCD Quinn School of Business.
Dear colleagues and friends,
Please find attatched details of an exiciting collaborative event hosted by the following groups:
PRAXIS
Equality Studies UCD
Meitheal Midwest
TradeMark Belfast
Kilbarrack CDPThe event aims to promote co-operatives and social/community enterprises as an alternative economic development model for Ireland.
In addition, the economic crisis and austerity measures are hitting poorer communities more than any other group and there is a need to develop alternative ways of creating employment in these communities.
This daylong seminar will be attended by individuals and groups from the community, voluntary and statutory fields. It is intended that the event will provide a space for critical discussion about alternative economic organising as well as building a network and demand for co-operatives and social/community enterprises in Ireland.
The minimum fee for the Forum is €10. Individuals and/or groups with more substantial means are free to donate a greater sum on the day of the event if they wish to contribute to covering costs. Please follow this link to book: http://www.eventbrite.ie/org/1932174201 Alternatively you can reply to praxisevent@gmail.com to reserve.
For detailed information on the event and speakers please follow these links:
http://alternativeeconomicorganising.wordpress.com/
To connect with PRAXIS on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/PRAXIS/189387697825500#!/pages/PRAXIS/189387697825500?sk=wall&filter=2
Regards,
PRAXIS et al.
Help me, peoples: collective bargaining rights February 8, 2011
Posted by Tomboktu in Economics, Labour relations, Trade Unions, Workers Rights.14 comments
Somewhere recently I (think that I) read or heard that the Labour Party will make a law change to guarantee the right to collective bargaining or to union recognition part of any agreement they make for going into government. I cannot find anything on their website on this topic that is related to the current election campaign. (There is a speech Michael D Higgins made in December 2007 when they introduced a Private Members Bill to give effect to this, but that is well outside the scope of this general election.)
Does anybody here know if this is a policy they are due to announce during the campaign, or was it merely wishful thinking on my part?
Strike! November 1, 2010
Posted by Tomboktu in Culture, History, Human Rights, Labour relations, racism, Trade Unions, Workers Rights.1 comment so far
Don’t miss STRIKE! – a play about the most dangerous shop workers in the world.
STRIKE! is a fictionalised account of the famous anti-apartheid shop strike on Henry Street in the 1980s. We are back after a sell out show in the Samuel Beckett for a week in May 2010 where it received a great reaction from audiences each night.
The play is running for three weeks – two weeks in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College from Tuesday 26 October to Saturday 6 November. Then we will run for 5 nights in the axis: Ballymun from Tuesday 9 to Saturday 13 November.
Written and directed by Tracy Ryan, STRIKE! uses visuals and music of the time to tell the story of a group of young people who went on strike to protest against apartheid and confronted the establishment, caused a state of emergency in South Africa and eventually saw the banning of South African produce in Ireland.
A clip of the show is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwhSKoAj0p0
More about STRIKE!
In Dublin in 1984, the economy was failing, unemployment was rife and 10 young women and one young man were about to change the world. In July a shop worker on Henry Street refused to sell South African fruit to a store customer and was suspended. Ten colleagues followed her out on strike; they thought it would last 2 weeks – it went on for nearly three years.
Come and see STRIKE!
Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College Dublin
Tuesday 26 October to Saturday 6 Nov. at 7.30 pm
Matinee on Saturday 29 and November 6 at 2.30 pm
Tickets €15.99; €11.99 concession; €9.99 matinee and for group rate of 10
Box office: Book online at www.tcd.ie/drama or by phone at 01 – 896 2461
axis: Ballymun
Tuesday 9 to Saturday 13 November at 8 pm
Tickets €14.99; €11.99 concession; €9.99 for group rate of 10
Box office: Book online at www.axis-ballymun.ie or by phone at 01 – 883 2100
Reality TV casts of the World Unite! June 4, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in Labour relations, Television Shows.4 comments
French workers are famous throughout the world for their determined assertion and defence of their rights. A large part of the Francopohbia seen in the British press at regular intervals is due to hostility to this very fact. So it is with particular glee that I read today (in one of Murdoch’s papers) that people who appear on French reality TV have won employment rights.
Maître Damien Celice, a lawyer for TF1, had warned the supreme court during the hearing that “there would be no more reality TV in France” if the contestants were given work contracts.
With Big Brother about to kick off on Channel 4 for its tenth season, I think I might move to France.