IV. Sources of flexibility
E. Collective bargaining and employers' unilateral action as a means of introducing flexibility
It is important to appreciate that the legislative provisions outlined above have been agreed as part of a process of collective bargaining under the national system of centralized agreements which has existed for the last 10 years. Dealing with developments in individual employment legislation, the former Minister for Labour, Mary O'Rourke, in an address on Contemporary Developments in Irish Industrial Relations at the University of Limerick in 1993 said "the PESP established a planned schedule of action relating to the review and development of significant aspects of labour legislation. The details of this schedule were agreed between the Government and the parties to the programme. The schedule for legislative action included the introduction of legislation relating to part-time workers … and unfair dismissals" (O'Rourke, 1993). This is illustrative of the way in which governments have progressed labour market regulation through the process of collective bargaining at national level.
While IBEC were generally opposed to more legal regulation of atypical work, the representative interviewed did see a role for agreeing some additional minimum regulation through negotiations at the levels of the social partners which might subsequently be translated into law. He said that:
the clearly preferable route to go is that these [regulations] should be left to the social partners, to negotiate in the spirit of the voluntary IR system that we have, at national level perhaps. We have had some success in this respect and in recent times we have had negotiations at European level between the social partners on the issue of part-time workers … and we were able to negotiate an agreement, an enabling agreement at EU level, on this whole area which will be translated later into national law. (Source: Interview with Turlough O'Sullivan, Director, IBEC.
Nonetheless he argued that his preference was that there shouldn't be any need for these agreements to be given the force of statutory power.
The centralized national agreements were seen by IBEC as providing certainty in relation to pay rates at national level while leaving individual employers free to introduce flexibility at local level. The IBEC representative described them as having "come from the bottom up and from the top down". [By this he meant that employers had a large degree of certainty at national level combined with considerable freedom at local level]. He added "I believe that the fact that we were able to put in place these national programmes had much to do with the fact that huge progress had [in the early to mid 1980s] been achieved at enterprise level throughout the country." This had come about, he said, by employers not relying solely on collective bargaining but by employers communicating directly with their employees. He said:
it's all about engaging employees, communicating with them, getting them involved in the whole effort, winning their understanding and support for what the enterprise is trying to do, so there is a major communications involvement dimension to all of this [i.e. flexibility]. (Source: Interview with Turlough O'Sullivan, Director, IBEC.)
The IBEC representative added that he did not see collective bargaining as necessarily a major factor in promoting flexibility. He indicated that the leading edge companies had been the American multi-national companies many of which were non-union and therefore did not have any collective bargaining in place.
By contrast all of the union respondents interviewed for this report were concerned at the absence of a provision for union recognition in Ireland. The representative of the TEEU questioned whether non-union companies actually had good human resource policies. Speaking of one American non-union company he had experience of, he said:
Everybody in that company is afraid to open their mouths, on the basis that if they open their mouths something untoward will happen to them. Nobody is asked for their points of view, nobody is asked as to whether the machinery they are using is being used effectively and efficiently, nobody is asked for their opinion about how they produce anything outside in that place. If that's imposing a position and getting effectiveness inside in the place, well then they can take it back to America as far as I'm concerned. (Source: Interview with Dan Millar, Assistant General Secretary, TEEU.)
The Assistant General Secretary of ICTU, Kevin Duffy, pointed out that the issue is being dealt with under the Partnership 2000 agreement. These discussions were at an early stage in autumn 1997 and not yet worked out. The President of SIPTU, Mr Jimmy Sommers, at this year's biennial conference of SIPTU in October 1997, warned that there would be no further national agreements unless the issue of union recognition was resolved.