Emmet Malone's Column:  In England the talk just now may be of a maximum wage, but as the players' union here prepares to survey its members in the Eircom League on pay and conditions in the New Year, the expectation is that it will discover many cases of players who aren't even making the legal minimum.

PFAI general secretary Fran Gavin has consistently pushed for players to be treated like workers in any other industry, but with many players in the First Division or on the edges of the bigger clubs' panels failing to gross even €100 a week, he insists that a considerable number of his members could be falling well short of the legally established minimum hourly rate.

"It depends on a lot of factors," says Gavin. "Whether they are paid from the time they start travelling to games, whether they are compensated for loss of earnings when they take time off from other jobs . . . they are all things that we want to establish one way or the other before sitting down with the league in the New Year to sort out a collective agreement."

It is several months since the union first raised the prospect of negotiating such a deal with the league's 22 clubs, and it is not entirely surprising that there hasn't been a huge amount of enthusiasm expressed about the idea by anyone at Merrion Square.

Gavin insists, however, that the deal would have some benefits for the clubs, with the document laying out clearly the rights of both parties and the expectations which they must live up to, although he admits he sees them, as employers, having most catching up to do in terms of their attitude towards an area that is now very heavily regulated by employment law.

"We have large numbers of members who never receive a pay slip or P60. We have part-time people being told they have to train like full-timers and others who don't seem to be getting their holiday entitlements. This is all covered by things like the Payment of Wages Act 1991 and Organisation of Working Time Act 1997.

"There's really no excuse for these things being major issues any more."

The recent crisis at Drogheda highlighted another major problem here, he points out, and this time the league itself, rather than the clubs, is directly responsible.

"If Drogheda had gone out of business the players there wouldn't have been able to work again until the start of next season because the transfer deadline rule says that clubs can't sign players after October 31st. Nothing like that would be considered remotely acceptable in any other walk of life."

Football, though, retains a few rather special characteristics and Gavin admits that when it comes to issues like taxation the union sometimes finds itself treading a thin line between winning players over and alienating them.

The recent introduction of tax breaks for sports people living in Ireland may remove a huge part of the incentive for players operating in the black economy, but there is still some progress to be made before the practice is killed off. That, though, is one of the reasons why Gavin firmly believes the issue of a maximum wage is counterproductive.

"I would always be against a move like that and I think that if it happened in England it would set an unwelcome precedent for everywhere else.

"But even talking about it here is a bit ridiculous, partly because the money isn't all that big in the first place but also because a week wouldn't be gone but somebody would break the agreement and then you are back into the territory of people having to lie about money and what players are getting. One way or the other, that ends up leading to trouble."

The bottom line, he says, is that it will be difficult for the league to be taken seriously by would-be sponsors until it is perceived to be well run and above board.

That is a point that we remain some way short of reaching but, as in so many areas, the movement, though slow, at least appears to be in the right direction.