Deputy Seán Dunne has given notice that he wishes to raise a certain matter on the Adjournment.
Adjournment Debate. - Abbottstown State Farm Workers.
I want to thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle for the opportunity of raising this very important matter on the Adjournment. It is desirable and very necessary that the House and the country generally should know that there are, at the moment, 37 farm workers on strike at the State farm at Abbottstown State farm, Castleknock, which is in my constituency. Some of these workers are to be seen, or were to be seen, picketing outside the office of the Department of Agriculture, Merrion Street. I am sure passers-by wonder what this is about or what has happened.
As one who has devoted a good deal of his life to the promotion of the interests of agricultural labourers in County Dublin and throughout the country generally, and who had the honour and privilege of being instrumental in securing the passage of legislation in other years beneficial to the farm labourers, securing for them in one instance the weekly half holiday, I take the opportunity of saying something on their behalf. I urge the Minister to look at their case with the maximum sympathy. I urge him to treat these men with equity and to be fair to them. These workers are living and working practically, it could be said, in the city of Dublin. Abbottstown and Castleknock are on the perimeter and the men face living costs similiar to those faced by workers in better-paid industrial employment. Nevertheless, their wage rate is no higher than £7 10s. per week.
I do not think any reasonable person will try to argue that this is a living wage at the present time. It is far below what is required by a person in order to make any kind of provision for himself, even if he is a single man, let alone a married man with a family and family responsibilities. There is also the fact that these men have to work 50 hours in summertime and 47 in wintertime while the general run of workers beside them in other industries—and, it could easily be said, the majority of workers in agriculture throughout County Dublin—do not work hours as long as these.
I know the arguments that have been used by the Department to keep wages down to this low level and I think they have always been totally unjustified. The principal argument has been, over the years, that a State body should not, in the opinion of various Ministers—and this includes Deputy Dillon when he was Minister for Agriculture in the inter-Party Government—pay very much more than the prevailing minimum rate which is applied by the Agricultural Wages Board in respect of agricultural workers in any particular county or portion of the county.
So far as County Dublin is concerned, that is totally fallacious. Farmers in the county do not care what wages the Minister pays to these farm labourers. The County Dublin farmers know that their wage levels, in the main, are considerably in advance of this amount of £7 10s. No matter what steps the Minister might take in the matter, their economy would not be affected. The number of workers involved is only 37. The amount of money involved in paying them an equitable rate and paying them the £1 which they demand would be relatively infinitesimal so far as the general running cost of the Department is concerned. Further, they are doing a very important job, working on a State farm, and in the main, they are men who must have specialised knowledge even to a greater extent than is ordinarily required by farm labourers. As most people know in rural Ireland, this knowledge is extensive. In fact, it is now being belatedly accepted that the term "labourer" is a misnomer when applied to a man working on a farm. It is coming to be accepted that a man working on a farm and who is fitted to carry out the general duties on a farm is as highly skilled a craftsman or tradesman as exists in industry or commerce or any other form of industrial activity.
It is also sad to think that so low a wage should be paid to men performing this very necessary work for an organisation which can very well afford to pay a decent living wage. Even if they were given the £1 which they seek, it would not bring them within shouting distance of what constitutes a living wage in the area in which they live and work.
On the question of hours, it is obvious the hours are far too long and should be reduced and brought into conformity with the hours applying in other public employment such as county councils and private employment such as industries in the vicinity and throughout the county. I think the Minister should—and I ask him to do so—give serious consideration to their claim. It is obvious that these men would not have taken this step, which is a very serious one for them, if they were not hard-pressed by the times. I urge on the Minister the need for immediate and sympathetic consideration of their case. I urge him to give them a fair deal at this stage.
There are a couple of points affecting this issue which I should like to bring to the Minister's notice. The first is that those men are not agricultural workers within the meaning of the Act because the Agricultural Wages Board Act does not apply to them. The Minister is aware of that. The second is that the Agricultural Workers (Holidays) Act does not apply to them; in fact, it is the Holidays (Employees) Act which applies to them. The extraordinary thing about this is that the disputes that have culminated in this strike have been dragging on for quite a considerable time. Numerous letters passed between the Federation of Rural Workers and the Minister's office about the issue and these three or four discussions took place. Whether you can call that negotiation or not is another question in view of the fact that on every occasion before the matter was finally debated or the meetings were concluded, and in practically every letter we have received, the matter has always been concluded by saying that the Minister does not propose to give the increase or the concessions.
What concessions are being sought? The answer is an increase in wages. As Deputy Dunne has said, farm workers or the people referred to as farm workers are getting £7 10s. per 50-hour week in the summer and per 47-hour week in the winter. A tractor driver gets £8 5s. for the same number of hours. Possibly the Minister may say that is the rate which applies and he cannot give any other. That is the tune his officials have been playing all along but in Department of Agriculture employment in the Botanic Gardens there are also tractor drivers and labourers.
In the Botanic Gardens, the tractor driver gets £10 1s. 4d. per week as against £8 5s. per week for the man in the other job. In fact, the tractor driver in the Botanic Gardens works 44 hours all the year round. The labourer in the Botanic Gardens gets £9 10s. 8d. for 44 hours. Labourers in Abbottstown will get £7 10s. for 40 hours per week in the winter and 50 hours per week in the summer. That is the same employment. There is another place which they call Shantilly. The labourers there get £8 18s. per 44-hour week.
I am not claiming those are wonderful rates of wages. For State employment they are pretty bad. However, when you compare them with what the people in Abbottstown are paid the comparison definitely shows that an attempt is being made to keep the man at Abbottstown at the lowest possible rate. The Minister has stated—his officials have stated—in a number of his letters that of course the wage must bear relation to the amount being paid by farmers.
As Deputy Dunne says, the farmers in County Dublin — the farmers in County Dublin he referred to are those paying the minimum wage rates—are paying a minimum rate of wages of £6 15s. per week. The Department agreed to pay 15/- over that. The Minister and his officials must be aware that very many of the bigger employers in County Dublin are paying substantially higher than £7 10s. per week for a job of £6 15s. per week and very many of them are working very much reduced hours.
I cannot understand why the Department are sitting so tight on this issue unless it is that the same mentality rules which has already caused disputes in two other semi-State firms in the city. We have a bus strike because "You are semi-State and you must not get any concession".
They got a bagful of concessions and they would not take them. The Minister was not dealing with them. The Radio Éireann Reporters must not get any concessions——
The Deputy must keep to the question before the House.
Now the Department of Agriculture say: "You will get no concessions." We are also looking for a reduction in the hours. In this case, we feel we have an extra-strong argument because the Agricultural Institute refuse also to reduce the hours. When we looked for a 45-hour week they said they could not give it. We took the matter to the Labour Court and we got a recommendation for a 47-hour week all the year round. The Minister could have said: "If the Labour Court recommended it for the Agricultural Institute, to men who in the main are doing the same type of work as are the people of Abbottstown, is there any reason why the men in Abbottstown, should not also get a 47-hour week all the year round?" So far, the Minister has not done that. If the Minister is anxious to be helpful in this matter he might do that even at this late stage. It might then be possible to discuss the other matters at issue under a different set of circumstances.
The Agricultural Institute employees had the right to go to the Labour Court. The employees of the Department of Agriculture have not got that right. I believe the Minister and his Department are deliberately holding down these people and have forced them to take strike action because they know they have not the right to bring the matter to a public tribunal. If it went before the Labour Court I believe they could not do anything but what they have done with regard to the Agricultural Institute and, therefore, the question of the 47-hour week at least must be conceded.
We have also asked for this pay scheme. In 1963, is it too much to ask that the Department of Agriculture would give to its employees what the Dublin, Meath and practically every other decent county council in the country has given, namely, the difference between social welfare benefits and their wages for a minimum period of two weeks? Is that too much? Yet, we are told it cannot be conceded. It would be a break with tradition, apparently, if it were conceded.
When a discussion took place with the Department's officials and when it was found they could not be moved on the wages question, and were not prepared even to consider it, a suggestion was made that they might introduce a system which the Agricultural Institute brought in and which they thought, and I think have proved, is something that will help them as well as the workers and that is that a service bonus of 2/- a week would be given to the employees. We said to the Department: "If you are prepared to do the same for the members in the employment of the Department we shall recommend it to them because we believe it will help." It means that after two years' service they will get 2/- a week automatically, so long as they do their work properly, over a number of years up to a maximum of 15. It would help to bring their wages along and to give them an interest in their work. The Department said "No" as they have said "No" to everything for the past 18 months.
To add insult to injury, four members of the staff out there were promoted. We have no objection at all to promotion from the staff. As a matter of fact, we welcome it. The extraordinary thing is that the people promoted, as far as we can find out, were promoted to washing bottles, and so on, for experiments out on the farm. As soon as the promotion took place, the men immediately left the trade union. I suppose that was part of the conditions under which the promotion took place. Following that, their wages were increased to £8 10s. rising by 6/- per week to £9 2s. Their hours were reduced from 47 in the winter and 50 in the summer to 36 hours per week. They got sick pay, extra holidays and protective clothing.
We are not grudging that to them. However, we resent that our members who are doing the really hard work out there have been told again and again: "You are not entitled to anything more than the poorest farmer can pay to the worst worker he employs plus 15/- a week." Everybody else can be treated in a different way. We shall not tolerate the situation and the men themselves will not tolerate the situation where they are being treated as second-class citizens. That seems to be the general attitude where people engaged in agriculture for hire are concerned all over the country at the present time.
The Minister does not want, no more than we want and no more than our members want, a strike on a State farm. I appeal to the Minister, having heard what Deputy Dunne and myself had to say here this evening, to accept the situation that there is something very much wrong. I appeal to him to accept the Labour Court recommendation for the Agricultural Institute and to reduce the number of hours to 47 per week. I appeal to him also to study the other matters which are under consideration. If he is prepared to do that, to grant the concession of the 47-hour week, I shall give a guarantee here that the pickets will be removed. The men will resume work if the other matters can be considered and discussed in a reasonable way by the Department and ourselves within the next week or so.
I should like to correct right away the impression one could gather from some of the remarks made by Deputy Tully that there has been in recent times any departure from what has been the accepted practice and policy in my Department in regard to the pay of employees on State farms. The practice has been, during the period of different Ministers, to do exactly what I am doing. In County Dublin, for example, the wages fixed for agricultural workers by the Agricultural Wages Board is £6 15s. per week. The reasonably good type of employing farmer in County Dublin is paying 10/- more than that minimum rate struck by the wages board and we pay, as we have been paying all down through the years, 5/- more than that.
There is no point in my discussing whether I think that is a good wage or not for the man who receives it, nor is there any point in my replying to the case that this is a State institution and in that sense that it should be isolated from what takes place elsewhere, say, in County Dublin, where Abbottstown is situated, or where any of the other State farms are situated all over the country, West Cork, Clonakilty, Athenry, Ballyhaise. They cannot be isolated from what is taking place on the ordinary well-run farm. These workers are looking after livestock, milch cows, tillage. In these respective institutions they are treated in the manner I have outlined.
I met representatives of the Dublin Trade Union Council last December and we had a very full discussion on this matter. Naturally my officials in the Department, in replying to the different requests and in the course of whatever discussions they may have had with the representatives of the men, must give effect to what is the general policy of the Department. There may be some point in blaming them if you can get away with it but it does not make sense to attempt to do so. Speaking not altogether as Minister for Agriculture but as an ordinary farmer looking at a number of men working in Ballyhaise Agricultural College, knowing that it is the taxpayer who must pay for such agricultural institutions, that men are employed there to do a day's work, I would say their job rates are by far the highest as agricultural employment goes. Nobody would suggest that if any farm labourer were given a choice of taking employment in Athenry, Clonakilty, Ballyhaise or Abbottstown, he would go to a farm instead.
I would not want to be placed in the position of being the advocate of low wages but I cannot divorce myself from the facts as I see them. It is not my ambition to see labourers of any class struggling with a small wage but how can anyone justify giving certain people a higher wage at the expense of the taxpayer merely because they are paid from the Exchequer? How could one justify treating workers in such State institutions in a manner different from that in which thousands of men who work for farmers throughout the country are treated? A comparison is made between the employment given in these institutions and that provided by county councils. I could make a case entirely against that. If a man employed by an agricultural school behaves himself even reasonably well there is continuity of employment and some security. He is convenient to his work and in most cases he has perquisites.
They do not find that in Mayo.
I am speaking generally. I have fairly good knowledge of what happens in these institutions and I make that claim in the full knowledge that it can be sustained by evidence. There is no comparison between the worker who is employed in these State institutions and the worker who is employed by the local authority, who may have to travel long distances, have his meals in different places every day, who has no continuity of employment and who even while he is contributing to a pension scheme is not assured of the continuity of employment that a man has who is working on the land.
I hope Deputies will take this as a genuine expression of my own personal feelings. I had no hesitation in giving expression to those feelings when talking to the members of the Dublin Trade Union Council. Naturally they could not concede that these arguments were forceful but they are forceful. There is no point in denying that the men who are employed in some of these institutions are not working too hard. None of us, I suppose, in the same circumstances would work too hard——
That is unfair.
——when working for institutions like these. I have a fair knowledge of the conditions in those places and I know they are regarded as tops in agricultural employment and it is not right that they should be taken entirely out of the general groove of agricultural workers and treated on a much more generous basis from the point of view of pay, hours and conditions than the men who really carry agriculture in association with their farmer employers. To think that a Minister for Agriculture could make that his policy, whatever his own feelings might be as regards the pay of all those men——
The Minister has done it in a couple of cases.
I have not done anything of the kind.
The Minister has in Shantilly.
I have not.
Of course he has. He is paying them a couple of pounds a week more for 44 hours.
They are in a different category altogether. Is it not a good thing that there are employees——
I am delighted.
——who can be given such conditions but if we take one man from the ranks, give him different employment, different conditions and advancement, why should that be used against us because we cannot apply these wages to the general body of agricultural workers in all these institutions?
Of course the Minister can.
Of course it cannot be done. I merely want to repeat that the policy we have pursued is a fair one. In County Dublin, for instance, the minimum rate fixed is £6 15; a fairly good employer will pay 10/- more and we put 5/- on top of that. We shall continue to do that but it would be undesirable to divorce the farming activities of these institutions all over the country from farming in general. I think the men are foolish to behave as they are behaving in this case.
The Dáil adjourned at 5.30 p.m. until 3 p.m. on Tuesday, 30th April, 1963.