Employers risk getting caught up in a tangle of red tape

A maze of employment regulations, statutory instruments and laws are a major challenge facing senior HR managers, writes Gerald Flynn

THE EMPLOYMENT Compliance Bill 2008, which still awaits adoption by the Oireachtas, will be the 31st statute governing employment relations in Ireland. If ever enacted, it will join 21 EU directives and 71 statutory instruments in our ever-expanding regulation of employment relations.

This maze of legislation was a dominant theme earlier this week at the annual Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conference in Dublin.

Rather than adopting ever more pieces of legislation, the focus, according to senior HR managers, should be shifting to addressing the maze of employment regulations, statutory instruments and laws as well as the varied collection of regulatory and appeals bodies.

This was evident earlier this week as senior HR managers heard that we already have, in addition to the regulations, a series of codes of practice and five different decision-making or monitoring bodies in the event of a dispute. These include the Labour Relations Commission’s Rights Commissioner services, the Labour Court, the Equality Tribunal and the Employment Appeals Tribunal and, most recently, the National Employment Rights Authority.

All these services are provided from exchequer funds but the increased use of lawyers has seen greater costs imposed on employers and employees, even though costs are not recoverable under these employment resolution mechanisms.

Solicitor Adrian Twomey warned that, as there is still not legislation on stress, it was becoming an expanding grey area providing grounds for complaints. Instead he proposed a system with employment contracts and termination clauses and a lump-sum payment which would allow for “no fault” dismissals. This exists to a limited degree in that a ceiling of usually two years’ salary is applied to employment dispute settlements but many employers are reluctant to pay staff 52 weeks’ pay – except in the cases of senior executives – to get them to leave their job.

Mr Twomey told the conference at Dublin’s Burlington Hotel that “just one, preferably short, Employment Rights Act should be introduced to replace all the others and we should have just one decision-making body for claims regarding statutory rights”.

This suggestion was welcomed by some senior industrial relations managers who added that the case for binding recommendations to resolve disputes would be a positive move, even if it is opposed by a majority of employers as well as many trade union leaders.

Seán O’Driscoll of CIPD Ireland said that “there is a need for leadership in both the public and private sectors and for honest conversations where managers let people know that they will get paid for the work they do but that nobody is owed a living”.

Mr O’Driscoll told the 740 people attending the conference that the institute’s professional standards had underpinned entry-level qualifications for HR in Ireland since the late 1930s. These standards are set for a major restructuring with a new “professional HR map” being developed to cater for the more modern zig-zag careers, with many managers spending periods on the fringes of HR management or at the core of implementing strategic human resource strategies.

Details of the new standards development were given to CIPD Ireland members at the agm, following their annual conference. “The role of HR practitioners is changing so fast that the institute has decided, rather than just update the existing standards, that a radical revisioning is necessary to equip the profession for the challenges ahead,” Mr O’Driscoll said.

This is based on one of the most comprehensive surveys of the HR community ever undertaken, when 4,500 people in Britain and Ireland answered detailed questions about their jobs, their professional needs and aspirations.

“To chart where the profession is now, and to expand its capacity to meet future challenges, the CIPD is, in many ways, starting again with a clean sheet,” Mr O’Driscoll said.

He later presented the chairman’s chain to Dublin City Council human resources director Frank Kelly, who will represent the institute for the next two years.

*Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions in Dublin; gflynn@alignmanagement.net