THE GOVERNMENT has signalled, in a paper presented at the national pay talks, that it is to oppose the introduction of new legislation which would make it mandatory for employers to recognise unions.
Instead, in a document drawn up earlier this week, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment put forward proposals for amending existing legislation to take account of trade union and employer concerns.
Unions have sought a new legal framework to provide for recognition and representation rights as one of five key issues they are seeking in the current talks. However, the department said that mandatory union recognition would be completely unacceptable to employers and that the Government favoured an agreed rather than an imposed outcome.
The issue of recognition for collective bargaining purposes has become hugely important for trade unions following a Supreme Court ruling last year in a case involving Ryanair. The unions believe that this ruling emasculated compromise legislation drawn up in 2001 and 2004 which gave them limited rights to represent workers in non-union companies.
They are also concerned that the ruling gave a status to internal representative forums within companies for dealing with staff issues.
The department said that mandatory recognition would be a major departure from the compromise which the 2001 and 2004 legislation attempted to capture.
"It is the view of Ministers that mandatory recognition would involve imposing an outcome which would clearly not attract support from all sides," the paper stated.
"Furthermore, there is a strong belief that the negative perception of such an imposed solution would have a detrimental effect on our ability to attract and retain investment and would be portrayed as a failure of social partnership's capacity to find pragmatic solutions. The preference would be for an outcome that avoids such negative implications while meeting the genuine concerns of trade unions."
The 2001 and 2004 legislation allowed unions to take cases on behalf of workers in non-union companies to the Labour Court which could see if their pay and conditions were in line with norms set through collective bargaining.
The department said the unions feared that the Supreme Court ruling allowed employers to avoid this process by engaging with an internal forum which could lack any real negotiating autonomy. They were also concerned that the identity of their members would have to be made known, leaving them open to victimisation.
It suggested that the legislation could be changed so that only internal forums that met criteria regarding their establishment and operation would be capable of engaging in collective bargaining, while a new definition of collective bargaining could also be inserted.
The department was doubtful whether it would be possible to legislate to circumvent the court's ruling on the disclosure of the identity of persons on whose behalf the trade union was purporting to act.
It suggested that the legislation could be re-focused to allow for trade union membership in a company to be verified on a confidential basis by dispute resolution bodies.