The Labour Court is to be given power to adjudicate in industrial disputes where companies refuse to follow the normal voluntary procedures or fail to deal in good faith with trade union or staff representatives. Its new mandate is contained in the Bill on trade union recognition to be published today.
Its provisions are in line with the deliberations of the Government's High-Level Group on Union Recognition and have been welcomed by senior trade unionists and the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation.
The chairman of the Labour Court, Mr Finbarr Flood, said he was "happy to take on the extra responsibilities contained in the legislation. The new role of the court has been clearly defined and I am confident we can carry out our new task".
Announcing the Bill, the Minister of State for Labour Affairs, Mr Tom Kitt, said the proposals "will deal with problems which arise in disputes where no negotiating arrangements are in place and where collective bargaining fails to take place".
However, the Bill does not provide an automatic mechanism whereby unions can haul reluctant employers before the court. It outlines detailed procedures which must be exhausted before employees or their representatives can seek the court's intervention.
One of the main conditions is that there must be no recourse to industrial action by employees until internal and external procedures for resolving the dispute on a voluntary basis are exhausted.
However, in the event of the company refusing to use the voluntary procedures available through the Labour Relations Commission for resolving the dispute, the Labour Court will be able to conduct an investigation and issue a recommendation. This will be binding on both parties for a year and can be extended.
The Bill also outlines general principles of natural justice that must be respected by employers in dealing with individual employees.
The measure originated out of a number of union-recognition disputes over the past decade, of which the most serious involved SIPTU baggage handlers at Ryanair in 1998, when Dublin Airport closed.
The SIPTU president, Mr Des Geraghty, and the IBEC director, Mr Turlough O'Sullivan, welcomed the Bill's provisions. Mr O'Sullivan said the measure faithfully represented the agreement between IBEC and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in the Government's High-Level Group on Trade Union Recognition.
Asked if employers might try to evade Labour Court intervention by pretending to co-operate with voluntary procedures, Mr Geraghty said that "if people act in bad faith, we have to deal with that by traditional industrial relations methods".