Ictu seeks new laws on agreements

The Irish Congress of Trade Union (Ictu) has said that it will press for new legislation to make collective agreements between unions and management legally enforceable in the wake of a controversial ruling earlier this week by the European Court of Justice that could have significant implications on labour rights.

Ictu said yesterday that the judgment was the latest in a line of rulings that attacked collective agreements and collective action and that it would influence its thinking in relation to the forthcoming referendum on the new EU treaty.

Ictu legislation officer Esther Lynch said that the ruling would have significant implications for "voluntary" industrial relations systems in countries such as Ireland where deals were largely agreed in negotiations between unions and management.

In the ruling the court found that Swedish trade unions could not force a foreign company to observe local pay deals. Ms Lynch said that Ictu would seek amendments to Irish law to make existing collective agreements legally enforceable in cases, for example, where they had been in place for a number of years. She said that the ruling implied that only local agreements which were set down in law - such as the registered employment agreements in the construction and a limited number of other sectors - were protected.

It appears that in other cases, companies registered abroad would be entitled to pay workers brought in from overseas the local rates of pay that applied in those countries. Ms Lynch said that if there were Irish staff working in the same company on higher rates, the new employees could rely on equality legislation.

She said that the European directive governing pay and conditions for workers set a minimum floor, but that there was always an understanding that local deals negotiated in member states for higher rates would be respected.