When speaking before Question Time, I was referring to delays in relation to the making of regulations and administration. I expressed the view that, in these circumstances, the Government should have regard to the position of workers who may be declared redundant between now and the time the Bill comes into operation. The House will recollect that when the heavy fall occurred in cattle prices, a special headage grant was made available by the Government. The House will also be aware that from time to time, special assistance has been rendered to sections of industry. Forms of assistance in other cases exist to encourage industry by way of grants, income tax concessions, and so on. However, fellow-citizens, workers in concerns, may, between now and the time the Bill comes into operation and through no fault of their own, be thrown on the labour market. Surely it is possible for the Government to make special temporary assistance available to them by introducing a special grant for workers whom redundancy would normally bring within the scope of the Bill when it comes into operation? There is no doubt that the Government have the power to do so, if they have the will. I do not think it is impossible to do this or unreasonable to ask the Minister to do it.
I said earlier that we cannot entirely throw all the sins of the Fianna Fáil Government upon the shoulders of the Minister for Labour but he must accept a share of them. He must accept his share of the sins of dilatoriness in attacking the manpower problem and the problem of providing employment which has been with us for a long time and which was certainly with us before the Minister became Minister for Labour.
I cannot understand why the worker who is declared redundant must wait four weeks before he may draw benefit. Is this some hidden economic lever which will be applied to force the worker to accept unsuitable work or work that would not provide him with a reasonable income or work which would not in any circumstances be suitable to his family or domestic needs? The section provides for payment of 50 per cent of normal earnings up to a maximum, including social welfare payments, of 90 per cent but I think few cases will occur where, with the addition of social welfare payments, the total income will come to within 90 per cent of the worker's earnings except in the case of a very low-paid worker.
I do not know why, for the purpose of this Bill, overtime earnings are excluded from the calculation of weekly compensation. I am aware of arguments in relation to other matters but not in relation to this Bill. The Minister is well aware that a considerable number of firms operate on the basis of regular overtime. They work overtime regularly and this is not done at the request of the workers. The worker does not go along and say that he is working a 42½ hour, or 45 hour, week and that he will work an extra five hours this week, or an extra five hours every week for the next three or four months. He does overtime because he is required to do it. In many cases where overtime work is the pattern, the worker who is not prepared to do his share of overtime discovers either that his job disappears or that the attractive jobs in the industry are not open to him because he is treated as an individual who is not very co-operative. The problem here is that these people who regularly do overtime because of the exigencies of their employment will, if they are declared to be redundant, get redundancy compensation based only on what would be the normal week's wages, exclusive of overtime.
The Minister should look at this again. The Bill, which has taken account of bonuses, is either related to earnings or it is not. As far as the Minister for Finance is concerned, overtime earnings are rated as income and if workers go to the Labour Court to argue their case in regard to wages and conditions, very frequently the employers will make the case that their earnings are to be taken as including overtime. I think it is correct to say that in the statistics supplied by the Department of Commerce and so on, where they deal with wage rates, the earnings refer to total earnings of males and females.
I cannot understand either why the Minister says that a worker must have four years with an employer in order to be compensated. I do not know where this particular magical figure of four years comes from. Why did the Minister not make it three years, or two years? The Minister might look again at that particular qualification. That qualification is important in regard to adult workers but a more important point is one to which I have already referred, that is, that a person has to wait for four weeks after being declared redundant before getting compensation. Surely one of the purposes of redundancy compensation is to maintain the worker and his family and to ensure that the dislocation shall be as little as possible, pending the worker's re-absorption, it is hoped, into industry.
It appears to be completely illogical to provide that a worker who qualifies as being redundant may have to receive the ordinary social welfare payments for four weeks. Is it hoped that in this way the fund will be saved that expense, or is it hoped that by having a worker go within the scope of receiving the ordinary social welfare payments for four weeks, it will attune his mind and that as a consequence he will be more amenable to accepting work that otherwise he would not accept?
I was somewhat surprised by one of the arguments in the Minister's statement. If it were accepted, the Minister, the Government and this House would have little hope of ever seeing the country developed. It is implied in the statement that if the compensation payments were too high, workers would not accept work. I should like to express the most emphatic resentment against that implication, that a worker who through no fault of his own is signing on at the unemployment exchange does so because he does not want to work. This is the suggestion that is clear in the Minister's statement when he says that the benefits must be sufficient to enable redundant workers to maintain standards relatively close to their pre-redundancy level while they are placed in, on retrained for alternative employment. Of course, this does not apply to the first four weeks. If they go on social welfare for the first four weeks, they will not be meeting what the Minister says is an objective.
The Minister also says that the benefits should be substantial enough to effect the necessary change of attitudes towards redundancy, and must not be so high as to add significantly to production costs or act as a disincentive to the seeking or accepting of alternative employment. This last point is of particular significance in regard to the weekly payments. This is the part of the Minister's statement which is being given effect to in the Bill and which I think should rightly be challenged in this House.
There is little use in members of the Government telling industrialists who might be interested in establishing industries here that we have available manpower, because, to our shame to some extent, we have had manpower available for years when most European countries were short of manpower. It is little use to say that the workers here are intelligent, capable and adaptable and ready trained to take jobs in industry and at the same time, say in this Bill what in fact is said by the Minister, that the level of compensation payments must be kept a bit lower than it might otherwise be because workers might not be encouraged to accept employment.