I move that the Bill be now read a Second Time.
The main purpose of this Bill is to bring agricultural workers within the scope of the Industrial Relations Act, 1946, and to abolish the present system whereby they are dealt with by the Agricultural Wages Board. The Bill proposes to transfer the wage fixing functions of the Agricultural Wages Board to a Labour Court Joint Labour Committee representative of agricultural workers and employers appointed by the Labour Court. The transfer of functions is effected by deleting two lines from Section 4 of the Industrial Relations Act, 1936, namely paragraph (h), which has the effect of excluding agricultural workers from the scope of that Act.
Section 1 contains definitions and Section 2 amends the Industrial Relations Act as described above. The remaining provisions of the Bill are consequential. Section 3 provides for the repeal of the Agricultural Wages Acts. The transfer of wages regulating functions to a Labour Court Joint Labour Committee and the consequential operation of the enforcement provisions of Part IV of the Industrial Relations Act render these Acts unnecessary.
Section 4 makes provision for the consequential amendment of the Agricultural Workers (Holidays) Acts of 1950 and 1952. In future, holiday remuneration and weekly half-holiday remuneration will be fixed from time to time by a Labour Court Joint Labour Committee. Inspectors appointed under Section 51 of the 1956 Act will be empowered to enforce minimum rates of wages and holiday remuneration. In short, the Bill presumes the transfer of the staff of the Agricultural Wages Board to the Labour Court. Section 5 provides for the setting up of the Joint Labour Committee for agricultural workers. Section 6 continues in operation certain statutory instruments made by the Agricultural Wages Board until such time as they are amended or revoked by the Labour Court.
The principal objects of this Bill, introduced in July last, are to abolish the Agricultural Wages Board, which according to the Minister for Agriculture have no power to prescribe the conditions of employment for agricultural workers, and to provide for the establishment of an Agricultural Joint Labour Committee under the auspices of the Labour Court which will have power to regulate the conditions of employment as well as the wages of farm workers. The powers of the Agricultural Wages Board, under Section 17 of the Agricultural Wages Act, 1936, are stated to be confined to the fixing of minimum rates of wages, overtime rates and the value of perquisites.
The Minister for Agriculture has stated in the House on several occasions that the Board have not power to prescribe conditions of employment. If so, the Agricultural Wages Board are the only wage-fixing authority in the State with no power to regulate conditions of employment. When the Minister for Agriculture was asked to define the powers of the Board in relation to conditions of employment on 16th May, 1961, he replied that Section 17 of the Agricultural Wages Act, 1936, did not lend itself easily to the making of an Order by the Board prescribing St. Patrick's Day as a holiday without loss of pay. All other wage fixing bodies in the State have this power and it is only fair and reasonable that the body charged with the obligation to fix farm wages should also have power to regulate conditions of employment.
There are 20 Joint Labour Committees functioning under the Labour Court. Employment Regulation Orders made by the Court have recently reduced the number of hours in the working week, in some occupations, to 45. In the Agricultural Wages (Minimum Rates) Order, 1962, the working week is one of 50 hours and the Minister for Agriculture claims that the board has no power to prescribe a working week of 45 hours. Is it fair and reasonable that the House and the Government should deny agricultural workers the facilities which have been made available to other workers? Is it fair and reasonable to say to agricultural workers in 1962 that the Wages Board is there to fix wages but not to regulate conditions of employment? If the House and the Government do not accept this Bill they are in effect telling the farm workers that if they want improved conditions of employment they should go on strike— as they did in 1946 and 1947 in support of a claim for the weekly half-holiday.
Quite a number of our native industries are based on agriculture or agricultural products and it is ludicrous to find that the body which fixes the wages of milkers has no power to regulate conditions of employment while the body which fixes the wages of butter-makers has this power. The self-same set of circumstances apply respectively to the "harvester" in the field and the "grinder" in the mill.
The sponsors of this Bill believe that the Government will find it extremely difficult to oppose this reasonable request, namely, that the agricultural wage fixing body should also have power to regulate conditions of employment.
Some, but not all, of the faults, which the sponsors of this Bill find in the Agricultural Wages Acts, have been described in another measure which was introduced in Dáil Éireann on 16th December, 1961—the Agricultural Wages (Amendment) Bill (No. 45). A somewhat longer list of proposals to improve the Agricultural Wages Acts were placed before Dáil Éireann on 1st August, 1961, when the House was considering a measure to give farm workers two weeks' holidays.
The Agricultural Wages (Amendment) Bill was abandoned because that lengthy and complicated Bill of 16 sections could not remove all the faults in the Agricultural Wages Acts within the limits of a private member's measure. The sponsors of this present Bill are satisfied that the deletion of two lines in Section 4 of the Industrial Relations Act 1946 is the best and the simplest way to modernise and improve the Agricultural Wages legislation.
In this connection I should like to point out that there is a set up in the Wages Board which has no parallel in wage fixing machinery in any country in Western Europe. There is a central board and five regional boards which are set up by the Minister for Agriculture. The Central Board consists of a Chairman to whom I have already referred, three neutral members, one a lady—I do not know if she knows anything about agriculture; I am sure she is at least neutral—and two gentlemen both of whom happen to be Fianna Fáil members of the county council but I shall not hold that against them. I will say, however, that one of them who is supposed to be neutral is the managing director of the firm which employs a very big number of workers in a rural area whose workers' wages are regulated by the rates of wages being paid to the agricultural workers surrounding the town in which this industry operates. How can that person be neutral? He would not be human if he were neutral.
There are four farmer representatives on the central board and again one of them, by a coincidence, is a Fianna Fáil councillor. The other four are small farmers. They possibly represent farmers' interests but they do not represent the wage-paying farmers' interests. There are four workers' representatives and again, by a coincidence, three of them are labour members of the county council. One of the main complaints we have about the Central Agricultural Wages Board is that while it is set up by the Minister there appears to be no effort made to give direct representation to organised farmers and organised workers on that board. We suggested that if this Bill which is before the House is not adopted, the Labour Court will see to it that these are the people who will be the representatives.
The five regional boards consist of people who are again selected by the Minister. They do not have any say in the matter at all because while they may make recommendations to the Central Board there is no obligation on the board to accept that recommendation even if the five members make a unanimous recommendation. The operative word there is "may". Again, we find all sorts of people representing the workers on these regional boards. Because of the fact that the recommendations do not count for very much, it is not very important but just for the record may I say that we have county council road workers, gangers, builders' labourers, even a fellow who was two years working as a builder's labourer in Birmingham representing his area as a workers' representative on the Agricultural Regional Wages Board. The fact that he did not turn up at any meetings did not matter apparently.
The Central Board meets occasionally and before they meet there is a notice sent advising them of the date of the meeting. It is an extraordinary thing that if the weather is bad or if for some other reason nobody is able to turn up at the meeting except the Chairman, the Chairman is a quorum and he can make a decision on his own which is binding. If everybody turns up and a decision is taken which is not unanimous, in other words if one of the people present decides to be different from the rest, then the Chairman can make a decision which may not be what the majority want or may not be even what the minority want. If that is a democratic way or a fair way to fix wages in the year 1962, then there is something wrong with my thinking. The sooner that type of thing is done away with the better.
When the Wages Board was first set up it did a very good job because in a very short time it at least put a floor on agricultural wages. We all remember the 24/- a week which was the first wage fixed by them and that started the regulation of agricultural workers' wages. However, for the last 20 years, the Agricultural Wages Board has been completely outmoded and does not provide a proper way of fixing agricultural wages or any other type of wages.