National guidelines should be agreed to promote more "family friendly" working environments, the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions has said.
Mr Peter Cassells has called on the Government and employers to negotiate a framework agreement for the provision of child-care facilities, more flexible working rosters and other initiatives to help working parents.
He also wants a national minimum wage to reduce gender inequality in the workplace.
Mr Cassells was responding to a debate held to mark the 20th anniversary of the Employment Equality Agency at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, Dublin, yesterday. After 20 years of equality legislation issues such as low pay and child-care still dominated the discussion, rather than sexual harassment or promotional prospects.
The workplace was still organised on the premise that one partner worked while the other, the woman, stayed at home looking after the kids, Mr Cassells said. All this had changed and even bigger transformations were about to take place.
A framework agreement on child-care, flexible working practices and a family friendly working environment were urgently needed, he added.
The first chief executive of the EEA, Ms Sylvia Meehan, said that 20 years ago the agency sought ways of linking the world of production with that of reproduction. Women were penalised as child bearers and any job they could do had less status than other jobs.
But child-care had not gone away, she said. If it was not resolved there was a danger we would fail to maintain a creative workforce and there would be no consumers to provide a market for what was produced.
Putting in place proper childcare facilities had to be the social, economic and political priority of our time, she concluded.
The director general of the Irish Business and Employers Confederation, Mr John Dunne, said primary responsibility for providing child-care facilities must lie with the Government.
Only very large firms could be expected to provide facilities internally.
While Mr Dunne seemed to be moving some way towards meeting the ICTU over child-care, a vast gap remained on the national minimum wage. Research presented to the conference by Prof Frances Ruane of Trinity College, Dublin, suggested the wage rates between women and men were converging, with the prevalence of women in part-time employment accounting for much of the remaining disparity.
But Mandate's national industrial officer, Mr John Douglas, who represents many women workers in the retail sector, believed women's position was deteriorating in many areas. The switch to flexitime, part-time working and job-shares in places like hotels and supermarkets was not driven by an equality agenda but a business one.
"A national minimum wage is an essential ingredient to address inequality," he added. "We are talking about the spreading of non-voluntary part-time working in many cases, an increase in trading hours and workplaces that are not family friendly or worker friendly," he added.
Mr Cassells said the question was no longer whether there would be a national minimum wage but at what rate it would be introduced. A reasonable minimum was in the interests of good employers, as well as necessary to protect workers from being exploited by bad ones.
A national minimum wage could undermine jobs, Mr Dunne said. There was no difficulty accepting that people should be adequately rewarded for the work they did "but this shouldn't be done with the blunderbuss of a national minimum wage".
Joint labour councils already cover about 100,000 low-paid workers in sectors like cleaning, textiles and the security industry. These should be extended along the lines suggested in Partnership 2000, he said.