When I moved the adjournment last night, I was pointing out that the Minister for Agriculture said that taking the agricultural workers from the Agricultural Wages Board, and putting them under the Labour Court or a joint labour committee, would mean having a Minister other than the Minister for Agriculture in charge of their wage fixing machinery and he thought it was not the right way to deal with the matter. I was pointing out that, in fact, very many other people, very many other sections of workers, are removed from the jurisdiction of a particular Minister for the purpose of fixing their wages. Perhaps a typical example would be law clerks who normally are under the Minister for Justice but, in fact, whose wages and conditions of employment are regulated by the joint labour committee of the Labour Court.
Local authority employees, who are under the Department of Local Government, again have their wages fixed by the Labour Court. Bord na Móna and ESB workers who are under the Department of Transport and Power again have their wages fixed by the Labour Court, Dairy and creamery workers, who are under the Minister's own jurisdiction, have their wages and conditions fixed by the Labour Court joint labour committee. Even hospital workers who are under the jurisdiction of an Tánaiste have their wages and conditions fixed by the Labour Court from time to time.
There is nothing unusual, therefore, in changing agricultural workers and putting them also under the Labour Court. They would just be falling in line. It would be doing something I think long over-due by preventing anybody from referring to agricultural workers as second-class citizens. A long as we have one set of laws governing the wages, working conditions and wage fixing machinery of agricultural workers and a different set giving higher wages and better conditions to all other workers, it can rightly be said that the agricultural worker is the Cinderella and is, in fact, a second-class citizen as far as those in control of his destiny are concerned.
I know that it has been stated here that there is very close contact between the agricultural employer and the agricultural worker and, of course, that may be so on the odd occasion where one man is employed for a particular reason—because of the illness of the head of the house perhaps—on a relatively small farm, but I can assure the Minister—and I have more experience of it perhaps than anybody else in this House—that there is very little close contact between big farmers and farm workers. To suggest that they are brothers doing the same type of work just does not ring true to those who know what the position is. The worker is somebody working for wages, doing hard work, skilled work. Do not forget that the farm worker must not alone know everything about crops, sowing, reaping and rotation, but he must also now know in most cases how to do running repairs and how to run machinery.
The farm worker is a man who gets wages at the end of the week, the small pittance that is paid to him, and when, for one reason or another he is unable to continue working, he has to depend on his family if he has got one or on friends to sustain him until the good Lord calls him. The proof of this, if proof is needed, will be found in a visit to any of our county homes because it is unfortunately true that more farm workers end their days in county homes than any other class of worker in the country. It is a shocking reflection on the farming community and on the agricultural industry in a country such as this to find that attitude.
Of course it is the natural follow on to the type of treatment the agricultural worker has been getting. He never got enough pay to meet his ordinary outgoings while he was working and surely then there is no reason why we should be surprised to find that he has not been able to put anything by for the rainy day or when he is no longer able to work and has nobody else to look after him that he must find his way to the nearest county home.
Great play has been made here about the question of the "minimum" wage, that the Agricultural Wages Board fix a "minimum" wage. Of course we know that according to the Act they do fix a minimum wage, but those who say that it is not also recognised throughout the country by a different name are less than truthful because we all know that in the agricultural community the minimum wage for the area as laid down by the Agricultural Wages Board is referred to as the "standard" wage. When somebody is hired by a farmer he is told he will be paid the "standard" wage. I was amazed to hear people, who should know better, talking in this House as if, with very few exceptions, farm workers were paid very much more than the minimum rate of wages. We know from our own experience, and can give the Minister evidence if he requires it, that the majority of farm workers in the country receive the minimum wage or the standard wage, if you like to call it that.
The extraordinary thing about it is that while agriculture is referred to, by anybody who wants to praise it, as the primary industry of the country, we have never been able to get the agricultural employer to pay a rate of wages comparable with that paid to those who process the agricultural produce after it leaves the farm. As a matter of fact, if you look over the list, bacon, meat, butter, cheese, fruit canning, grain milling, bread and flour, sugar, confectionery, food preparation, distilling, you find that every worker there is paid a much higher rate than that paid to the agricultural worker. There does not seem to be any reason for this. If the processing of agricultural produce can afford to pay a decent rate, then surely the people who produce it should also be entitled to receive a decent rate. I do not think there can be any reason.
Take other rural occupations. In the case of the ESB, Bord na Móna, forestry and road workers, the working week has been reduced but the Agricultural Wages Board insist they have no right to alter the working week for agricultural workers. It is rather interesting, too, that while the previous chairman of the Wages Board accepted motions for the purpose of discussing the question of reducing the working week, the present chairman has so far refused to accept such motions despite the fact that while the previous chairman was accepting them, the present chairman was Secretary of the Department of Agriculture. While I am sure he was an excellent man at his job over the years as Secretary of the Department, the wage-fixing machinery for agricultural workers is of such importance that it is not right that a person, who has completed his normal span as a civil servant and who did an excellent job in that capacity, and who has gone out on pension, should be taken back and put in charge of that machinery. It is belittling the agricultural worker that that sort of antics should be adopted. Again, I am afraid the Minister or his predecessor must accept responsibility for it.
The chairman of the Agricultural Wages Board may be, and I am sure he is, a normal decent Irishman but his outlook on agricultural wages seems to be very different from that of other people. For that reasons, a person who could be termed independent should have been appointed.
When introducing the Bill, I referred to the constitution of the Agricultural Wages Board. Let me repeat that I think it is too bad that the board should be so constituted. Apparently, according to the central Board the five regional boards have no authority to do anything. The central board have repeatedly rejected recommendations made by them. If they stand for anything, at all, there should be some other system of appointing members. The Minister will not disagree when I say that in areas in which the trade union of which I am general secretary made recommendations to have members who were employed as farm workers appointed on regional committees, the Minister's name was used to make the appointments and people who were not connected in any way with agriculture were appointed.
One thing occurred again and again, namely, that in very many cases the persons appointed were close connections of the local Fianna Fáil cumann. As a politician, I can understand that certain people, if they want to get into a position, will approach the politician and say that he would like a trip to Dublin so many times a year and suggest that he should be appointed. The Minister should resist that sort of pressure. There was an instance of a county council road worker being appointed as a regional member.
