AN INDEPENDENT review into the background to the week-long strike by electricians last summer has recommended significant changes to the way terms and conditions are set in the electrical contractor sector.
Traditionally pay and conditions in the sector have been determined by a collective agreement voluntarily negotiated between employers and unions through a national joint industrial council.
The new report says the legally binding registered employment agreement for the sector had worked well for many years. It says serious problems have emerged, however, due in part to:
- current economic and employment circumstances;
- failure to update the agreement to reflect industrial reality;
- competition from outside the jurisdiction;
- enforcement of the agreement, including method;
- a series of legal challenges to the system by parties not members of the National Joint Industrial Council for the sector.
The report says the immediate dispute arose from an application to give effect to increases agreed in hourly rates for electricians.
It says this increase, agreed in September 2007 by the Technical Engineering and Electrical Union (TEEU) and two employer bodies, the ECA and AECI, was not applied because of legal interventions by other groups outside the National Joint Industrial Council.
The review, by former Labour Court chairman Finbar Flood and chairman of the National Centre for Partnership and Performance Peter Cassells, concluded “the current serious problems do not arise from the system itself but from the way in which the system has been operated”.
The review recommends that the National Joint Industrial Council should be totally reformed through introduction of new rules.
It proposes the new rules of a reformed council should afford representational rights to the TEEU and any permanent body of standing representative of employer interest in the sector.
It also recommends the objectives of the council should be broadened to cover not just pay and conditions but all issues of common interest. These would include training and apprenticeships, health and safety, adaptation to change, the system of tendering and subcontracting.
The group also proposes the registered employment agreement should be reviewed, updated and rewritten to reflect the changed reality of the electrical contracting industry.