Time for binding Labour Court decisions

THE RECENT stand-offs at Lufthansa Airmotive and Dublin Bus again highlight the issue of enforcing Labour Court recommendations.

For a few years, one of the most reflective human resource strategists in the country and a key Ibec council member, Niall Saul, has been pressing for binding Labour Court rulings as opposed to the present system of voluntary recommendations.

Last week Mr Saul’s proposal was partly echoed by the country’s most experienced trade union chief, Dan Murphy, a key architect of social partnership. In his valedictory address to his Public Service Executive Union conference in Killarney, the retiring general secretary floated the idea that trade unions consider moving on from the traditional voluntarist system of dispute resolution.

For the past 15 years it has been unfashionable to question free market capitalism and, apart from former Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins, few dared mention bank nationalisation. How times have changed. It is the same in the area of employment relations: the established accommodations between labour and capital are being questioned with proposals for some forms of compulsion emerging.

The ground has shifted on labour law with increased EU-driven legal protections and the newly invigorated labour inspectorate through the National Employment Rights Authority. Trade unions have been demanding greater basic legal protections as they find that they represent a diminishing proportion of the workforce.

A majority of the craft workers who refurbish aircraft engines at Lufthansa’s plant in west Dublin decided to “play chicken” with the German company’s board for the past three months. The decision was partly influenced by their experiences of management allegedly overplaying their hand by presenting doomsday scenarios in the past. But this time the reality of declining competitiveness, obsolete engines, and German trade unions anxious to get the maintenance work “back home” to either Hamburg or the former east Germany seriously worried many in IDA Ireland, the Department of Enterprise and at senior social partnership levels.

Still the three unions involved were slow to engage and even after the prescribed trips to the Labour Relations Commission and then the Labour Court, they could not sell the flexible hours package to their members.

Eventually the Labour Court recommendation was trimmed from five to four weeks’ flexible working hours in a year, under the aegis of the National Implementation Body which has no formal powers but can pressure managers or employees into further compromise.

Worthy as these back-room pressures may be, directed by Ibec and Ictu chiefs, they do not enhance workplace agreement and seem to promote ceasefires rather than enduring peace.

Instead, we could turn to the Labour Court and make its honest broker recommendations binding. That would not answer all industrial dispute problems – as we saw at Dublin Bus.

The key to a regime of binding Labour Court recommendations is that managers and workers need to understand the consequences of industrial action.

One might have thought that at a time of recession, that would have been clear at Lufthansa Airmotive and Dublin Bus, but it obviously was not to key groups in both of these companies.

Gerald Flynn is an employment specialist with Align Management Solutions