#Solidarity with Independent Councillor Cieran Perry for proposing the motion and with Dublin City Council who last night voted in favour of supporting replacing the anti-worker 1990 Industrial Relations Act with the Fair Employment Bill 2022 (2)
The 1990 act was introduced as a control mechanism on trade unions. The act introduced many changes to the accepted norms of industrial relations up to that time. It banned support strikes, solidarity action, political strikes, sit-ins and immediate action. It isolated individual workers and introduced 7 day notice. It puts many conditions and restrictions around balloting for industrial action so much so that you would need a barrister in one hand and a ballot box in the other to take strike action today. It ended Union autonomy and transferred what were always Union decision to the judiciary.
At the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) biennial delegate conference in 2021 the following motion proposed by the Dublin Council of Trade Unions (DCTU) and amended by Connect Trade Union was unanimously passed and is now ICTU policy
“Conference recognises that the restrictions on trade union action in the 1990 Industrial Relations Act need to be opposed, and that the act should be reformed to restore rights which trade unions had before 1990. Conference mandates the executive to seek an alternative legislative regime which would allow trade union and industrial action for workers, for issues that concern workers across society and, across employers, and for effective solidarity to workers in dispute”
The Trade Union Left Forum have drafted a bill for that alternative legislative regime as per the DCTU motion which replaces rights lost by workers as a result of the 1990 act.
The bill is called the Fair Employment Bill 2022.
Now we need to progress the Fair Employment Bill as drafted by the Trade Union Left Forum
This is a very necessary piece of legislation that will create a level playing field between workers and employers.
“With all their faults, trade unions have done more for humanity than any other organisation of people that ever existed. They have done more for decency, for honesty, for education, for the betterment of the race, for the developing of character in people, than any other association of people.” — Clarence Darrow.
