Sinéad Gibney: Calls to Strengthen Collective Bargaining Now

Deputy Gibney, Go raibh maith agat Cathaoirleach and I'd like to start by wishing everybody in this house a happy May Day this coming Friday and particularly I wish to extend that to the staff here in Leinster House who work so hard to allow us as representatives to do our jobs and work so hard and of course many of the staff here are union members and I also want to thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion which I think is really succinctly it just captures very easily the four key issues that we need to address workers rights and to strengthen workers rights in this country by recognising collective bargaining by giving unions access to the workplace so that they can recruit and organise to match the minimum wage with the living wage and to finally deal with remote and flexible working in a way that works Minister and not in a way that simply pays lip service to it. We are an outlier in Europe by not recognising unions and it is such a problematic issue in so many areas that I have dealt with in my portfolio dealing with employment. The voluntarist system simply does not work and I have worked in the private sector, in the public sector, I have owned my own business so I understand why the voluntarist system can't work because if you are a company which is driven by profit you do not ever choose to recognise workers rights over your shareholders interests it's never going to be something that you choose to do or volunteer to do so what that voluntarist system tries to do will never ever work because the power imbalance is too out of kilter. I mean this government I was at an event recently and I heard a European commentator describe von der Leyen's approach on this European Union administration as uncritically pro-business and I think that is an absolutely perfect term to capture the attitude of this government. Uncritically pro-business in so many different decisions that you make and policies that you design and laws that you enact you think about business you think about the market and how it can solve our solutions to the detriment of all other interests in society and that is how you choose to address this and that is why we persistently keep this voluntarist model that we all know doesn't work and we've heard a lot about the covalent workers today I joined those covalent workers on their strike in Sandefur which is in my own constituency a number of months back when 300 jobs were under threat never mind the 700 that are now under threat and that is a union, part of the Communications Workers Union which I then attended the Digital and Tech Workers Alliance chapter of that union and against all odds because it is so hard for unions to recruit when people are going to say to them well why would we bother signing up to a union when you go to the negotiating table and you have no power to drive the employer to that same negotiating table so unions face huge issue in recruitment and membership is always going to remain low if we have this voluntarist model but despite that the data chapter of the Communications Workers Union and I spoke at their launch was one of the most exciting moments that I've had yet as a TD because it felt to me like that same momentum that we know that we know of trade union movements of old where people recognize that collective bargaining is crucial the collective action is crucial that they have a power imbalance which can only be addressed by solidarity by speaking together and by acting together and that is what we need to do and those covalent workers have trained the AI agents which are now taking their jobs so they are a little tip in the iceberg that we are going to see emerge in the coming weeks and months and years ahead which is going to absolutely devastate sectors of the workforce across society the way you can think about it is anything that is text based lawyers journalists accountants they're all under threat because data models can take that information and do a lot of the tasks that we do we are going to see labor displacement through this industrial revolution the fourth industrial revolution the AI revolution at a pace and scale that we have never ever seen before as a species and in this country we have no power as workers to combat that to deal with that to deal with this as the challenge that it is and there are so many other crises and challenges facing our workforce youth unemployment and when I've asked about youth unemployment what I get back is we've got more people in jobs in Ireland than we've ever had before that we have you know full employment in this country well I will tell you that youth unemployment is a canary in a coal mine and if we don't watch out for it if we don't start to recognize that it is coming in other areas then we are setting ourselves up for failure remote working and I'll be bringing legislation on this myself very shortly to strengthen the right to request absolutely but the right to access remote and flexible working arrangements because it is not working as it is minister and we need legislation that actually allows people to have that question put to their employer that their employer can't just pull out of thin air something that they feel is appropriate to answer with but actually has a categorized set of responses and we also need that to kick in from day zero from people's first day of their job because at the moment it only kicks in six months after you start bogus self-employment in work poverty the cost of living crisis that we are all facing and the reduction of quality and it to have been out and about recently talking about quality work and quality jobs the gig economy has started what we know is coming across multiple sectors in terms of automation and in terms of AI and in terms of the precarity of work that that drives so when we say we've got full employment it masks the fact that so much of that employment is now poor quality employment it is employment which doesn't allow people to advance in life it doesn't allow them to move out of their parents home it doesn't allow them any security or any decisions for them to live their lives and fulfill their potential it keeps them down as so many of these mechanisms do and AI as I say is just going to keep coming at us and we do not have the social structures in place as it stands with this system that we have this voluntary system to combat that to deal with it and to treat it in the just transition way that we need to think about it and I've said that before that when we talk about the just transition of the climate we need to also tack on to that the digital just transition that we should be considering because there are going to be that level of jobs displaced that we absolutely need to see this as the crisis that it is and the other thing that we need to call out in terms of this government is the resistance that you have to those improvements that we've seen in economic and in jobs in particular in working conditions that have come through from the EU because although we do eventually transpose those things we do so in a way that absolutely is kicking and screaming and in terms of the current obligations that we're trying to meet in terms of union membership I mean I've heard government representatives say that the JLCs fulfill our commitments in terms of collective bargaining which is absolute nonsense because the JLCs are working in some cases I absolutely concede that there are ways in which they are good but they're not good across the board some of them have hardly met and that to me does not create a situation where workers feel in any way empowered or in any way that they have a fair shout in terms of dealing with their employers the vision that we need to seek is a social democratic society where unions are properly recognized where people can sign up for their trade union where they don't have to hide and furtively discuss the idea of organizing within their workplace where that access to to the workplace is provided for unions which allows people to organize which allows them to bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions we need that system where the living wage is where our minimum wage is at and where people can access remote working flexible working arrangements and that they can do so with the power of collective action that they can sit at a table and expect that their employer will come and meet them at that table because right now they can choose to collectively unite to collectively act and then they go to that table and the voluntary system says that the union or the employer simply just doesn't have to come they can say no thanks I mean I've heard of companies where you will have one plant which does recognize unions and another which doesn't and that's just from historic legacy issues where in one company it's dealt with by HR and another company it's dealt with by proper industrial relations mechanisms that is ridiculous it is absolutely insane that you cannot rely on the security of trade union membership and what collective action can bring to you in the workplace and literally within one company that it can change from one to the other we must address the power imbalance that we currently have and we must force employers to the come to the table and this motion does exactly that by outlining those key issues that need to be addressed collective bargaining union access living wage and remote working.