Employers have said the Government is facing a stark choice on whether to borrow to fund welfare payments or spend what money they can on underpinning businesses to protect jobs.
Arriving at Government Building for talks with the Government on a nation recovery programme, Ibec director general Turlough O’Sullivan said unemployment was approaching half of a million and thousands of companies were closing down.
He called on the Govermnebt to introduce a PRSI holiday for employers as well as a trade credit insurance scheme and an easing of the rules in relation to state aid.
Ibec supported proposals put forward today by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) for a €1 billion package of measures to protect jobs.
Mr O’Sullivan said employers and unions were “singing for same hymn sheet”. He said the talks on a social partnership deal for economic recovery were at a crucial stage.
Earlier, Ictu called for the establishment of a new €1 billion job creation and protection plan that would help tackle the unemployment crisis. It said the issue of jobs is of the same magnitude of the banking crisis and requires the same urgency, focus and magnitude.
According to new figures released on Wednesday an extra 15,800 people joined the live register last month pushing the unemployment rate to 11.4 per cent. The live register has now almost doubled over the past 12 months to 388,600 on a seasonally adjusted basis.
Meanwhile, in its quarterly report issued earlier this week, the ESRI forecast that the unemployment rate would reach 16.8 per cent next year. The number of people out of work is likely to average 366,000 in 2010 compared with just 100,000 in 2007.
Under the plan put forward by Ictu, a fund of €1 billion – comprising both existing and new resources – would be used to ensure redundancy becomes a ‘last resort’ and guarantee access to training for those who do lose their jobs.
The programme envisages changes to existing employment and redundancy law, tax law, and the social welfare code to remove barriers to work and training. It also envisages making the education system more directly attuned to the jobs crisis.
As part of the scheme, a new Social Innovation fund would be created which could be used to finance a wide range of initiatives and schemes designed to meet serious social needs such as community development and childcare and allow unemployed to people put their skills to work.
“We are proposing a range of new, innovative and creative measures that will harness all the machinery of state to the same objectives – protecting jobs, creating new employment and training and protecting peoples’ incomes. This crisis requires an ‘all of government’ approach as it impacts across all of society, not in discrete and disconnected areas," said Ictu assistant general secretary Sally Anne Kinahan
Ms Kinahan stressed that the overriding goals of the scheme are to keep people ‘attached to the workforce’, avoid sharp income drops and ensure workforce skills do not become degraded through sustained periods of unemployment.
It includes plans to allow for improved apprentice training, a job rotation option which would allow employees to participate in training while those who are unemployed fill in for them and reform of the social welfare system to support alternatives to redundancy.