Why has Isme been left out of collective bargaining forum?

Reasonable people can disagree with the Labour Employer Economic Forum’s report on the future of collective bargaining published last week. Among other things, it recommended the strengthening of joint labour committees and, perhaps surprisingly for a report welcomed by employer’s group Ibec, forcing employers to engage with trade unions if they have the support of 10 per cent of a particular grade or category of worker in an organisation.

But the decision to exclude the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association (Isme) from the high-level working group established by the Department of Enterprise seems a strange decision. Chaired by Prof Michael Doherty from the school of law and criminology at Maynooth University, Ibec, Ictu, Siptu, Fórsa and the Construction Industry Federation all had members on the panel.

Speaking at the Oireachtas enterprise committee in the summer of 2021, Minister for Enterprise Leo Varadkar defended Isme’s exclusion. “Small business,” he said, “is represented on the Labour Employer Economic Forum through Ibec and the Small Firms Association [which operates under Ibec’s umbrella]. The difficulty with adding more and more bodies is the question of where one stops. At the moment, Chambers Ireland and Ibec are there as the umbrella bodies for all business organisations.”

Bitter pill

Varadkar’s argument here must be a bitter pill for the small, medium and indeed micro enterprises that Isme represents to swallow, particularly when it comes to the Labour Employer Economic Forum’s recommendation that non-union employers be penalised if they decline to negotiate with trade unions. “The LEEF report,” Isme said on Monday, “suggests that the threshold for collective bargaining should be 10 per cent of the workforce with no minimum limit as to the number of employees. Given that “92 per cent of businesses employ less than 10 people this clearly shows this is an absurdly low threshold”.

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Isme takes this to mean that “collective bargaining could be imposed on a business where one employee wanted it and nine did not”.

Ibec and Ictu have both welcomed the report, which will inform new legislation next year. But much like the Government’s delayed Right to Request Remote Working Bill, which has been subject to all manner of criticism from both sides of the employer-employee divide over a perceived lack of engagement with stakeholders in the consultation process, achieving buy-in from SMEs for any significant changes may prove to be a lot more difficult than it needs to be.