Dáil Éireann debate -
Thursday, 25 May 1978

Vol. 306 No. 12

Vote 42: Labour (Resumed).

Debate resumed on the following motion:

That a sum not exceeding £27,355,000 be granted to defray the charge which will come in course of payment during the year ending on the 31st day of December, 1978, for the salaries and expenses of the Office of the Minister for Labour, including certain services administered by that Office, and for payment of certain grants-in-aid.

—(Minister for Labour).

Mr. O'Donnell

Before Question Time I was referring to the role and the performance of AnCO and I expressed the opinion that this organisation had made a very important contribution to the vital area of industrial training. There should be close cooperation and understanding between the Minister's Department and the Department of Education in relation to AnCO's training schemes. I understand that different areas of conflict have already presented themselves and I envisage the natural evolution of AnCO's role and responsibility as being very much tied in with the technical education branch in particular of the Department of Education. I am sure the Minister is aware that with the growing intake of trainees, apprentices and so forth by AnCO and the rapid development of AnCO in recent years there is need to ensure that there is no duplication between the facilities in training schemes and courses offered by the Minister's Department through AnCO and those offered by the Department of Education in the technical and technological field. I do not see why there should be any conflict. The educational and training resources available in this small country are small enough, so it is vitally important that there be no conflict of interest between the Department of Labour and the Department of Education. We must ensure the optimum utilisation of the resources of both Departments to evolve an appropriate national training policy for employment.

The Minister referred to the question of management training, which indeed is very relevant to the role of AnCO. He referred to the increased State subvention for the Irish Management Institute. I had experience of the IMI during the four years I had the privilege to be Minister for the Gaeltacht and I was very aware during that time of the vital importance of the availability of properly trained managers for new industries. The farther away one goes from the capital city of Dublin the more difficult the problem of unavailability of trained management becomes. In the Gaeltacht development, the area in which I had personal experience, the first major problem confronting Gaeltarra Eireann was the difficulty of getting suitably trained managers for industrial projects; second, and more important, was the difficulty of retaining them in remote, peripheral isolated regions. Therefore I support any steps that will be taken to accelerate and upgrade the training of managers. We were so concerned some years ago about this lack of managerial skill in the Gaeltacht region that the Department of the Gaeltacht and Gaeltarra Eireann had to initiate a scholarship scheme at the Regional Technical College in Galway where young people from the Gaeltacht are being trained in business studies and basic managerial sciences with a view to having a pool of skilled and trained managers available. I endorse what the Minister has said here in relation to the vital importance of the managerial dimension in economic development. He rightly said that there is huge expenditure on industrial training and on the imparting of skills of various kinds to the work-force to prepare them for industry and that parallel with that there should be appropriate managerial training courses which should keep pace with the acceleration and increase in the number of training courses being offered by AnCO at the worker level.

In my experience of the IMI I have been very impressed with the setup there and with the commitment, skills and expertise of their key executives and their various training personnel. Relevant too is the organisation known as CERT who are responsible for the recruitment and training of personnel for hotels, catering and the tourist industry. I have always held the view which I have expressed here in the House down the years, and nothing I have learned since leads me to change my view, that the tourist industry with all its offshoots—the hotel and catering industry, the travel business and so on —is a vital industry for the economy and that it should have available to it the same educational training facilities as are available to industry through AnCO.

The Minister has referred to the recurring question of whether CERT should be hived off from the overall umbrella of AnCO. I am aware of the type of work carried out by CERT and I am glad that the Minister has set up a review body comprised of representatives of CERT and of AnCO as well as of the other relevant organisations—Bord Fáilte and the Department of Education, for instance. However, this review body should not confine itself to examining the question of whether it would be preferable to hive off CERT totally from the umbrella of AnCO but that this review body would make an in-depth study of the education and training needs of all aspects of the tourist industry. This is an industry which by reason of its seasonal nature presents immense problems in relation to the recruitment and to the retaining of staff. I do not know precisely what percentage of the industry is seasonal, but a substantial part of it is likely to be on the basis only of between three and six months per year. The staffing problems resulting from this situation are of great concern to hoteliers because they find it necessary to recruit new staff each year. Very often these people are school-leavers.

Some years ago I recall considering this problem. At that time there were six or seven hotels in tourist areas under the auspices of Gaeltarra Éireann and we were considering the possibility of providing offseason employment perhaps in craft work, in the manufacture of souvenirs and so on during the winter months, so that in this way each hotelier could retain the nucleus of a permanent staff who would be available to take up work in the catering industry each summer. It is necessary that CERT be strengthened and reorganised. The review body that has been set up may be a step in the right direction in this context. I would prefer CERT to be an independent body having wide terms of reference and being able to formulate imaginative programmes of training, education and off-season employment in the hotel and catering industry and for all people involved in the tourist industry.

The Minister referred to his responsibility for implementing the European Social Fund. He referred to the difficulties that have been encountered in relation to the social implications of EEC transport legislation for this country. The question of the tachograph has been mentioned. This question was adverted to also during the recent debate on the Road Transport Bill. I am glad the Minister appreciates that the introduction of the tachograph has major implications for the Irish road haulage industry and to the whole question of transport costs. The EEC Commission and the Council of Ministers recognise that we have certain problems and because of this situation a breathing space was allowed in our case. However, I urge the Minister to do everything possible to ensure that the EEC are fully aware of the special problems of a small country like ours when there is a question of the tachograph or of any other transport regulation being introduced. There should be special consideration for us having regard to the fact that we are the furthest removed from all the European mainland and that our industrialists must transport their goods much greater distances and share a much higher element of transport charges than is shared by their competitors in the UK or on the European mainland. I urge the Minister to continue his efforts to ensure that the maximum breathing space is given in regard to the implementation of the tachograph or of any such legislation.

The two areas that I considered to be of the greatest expectation so far as our joining the Community was concerned were the social fund and the regional fund, but four or five years later I must confess to being sorely disappointed with the failure of the EEC to evolve a realistic social or regional fund.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

I do not think the Minister for Labour has any responsibility for that.

Mr. O'Donnell

He is responsible for the social fund.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

But not the regional fund.

Mr. O'Donnell

They are interrelated.

Mr. G. Fitzgerald

That is not quite accurate.

Mr. Keating

May be they are interrelated this evening.

Mr. O'Donnell

They are interrelated to the extent that the Minister referred to the question of getting special recognition so far as the social fund is concerned for depressed and disadvantaged areas in the weaker areas of the Community. Therefore, this is tied in with the whole concept of regional policy. I am highly critical of the failure of the EEC to implement realistic social and regional policies and in particular their failure to formulate and implement policies which fail to take into account the special circumstances of small countries like ours, particularly the special circumstances of the peripheral and remote regions such as the western seaboard and the off-shore islands.

The European Social Fund is making special provision this year for youth employment. That brings me to the final and perhaps the most important aspect of the Minister's brief. I refer to the input of the Department to the whole national strategy of employment creation. At the time the Minister set up the Employment Action Team I thought the idea was good and I expected great results but let us face facts. In the various areas in which the team were told to examine possibilities of creating employment for young people there was not required a great deal of initiative or imagination to think of ways and means of spending money on worth-while community schemes, amenities and so on.

I cannot understand why this Employment Action Team have taken so long—ten months now—to come up with anything worth while. Muintir na Tíre, the outstanding local community development organisation in Europe, every local authority, every chamber of commerce and every youth organisation has schemes and programmes which could be implemented if they had the funds. I cannot understand what this team have been doing. Their progress and performance have been unimaginative, uninspiring and incomprehensible. The sooner the Minister disbands them the better. In one scheme recently the corporation in Limerick took on 30 people. What will be the effect of 30 jobs when there are 6,000 on the live register? There has been an improvement of only 100 during the past 12 months.

I recognise as much as anybody else the daunting challenge of creating employment. I submit that it can be done only by the formulation and implementation of radical new employment creation policies, embracing new ideas and new attitudes. Since this Government took office there has been a remarkable lack of initiative and new thinking and results to date have been appallingly bad. My reaction to the purpose of the Minister as revealed in his speech is one of grave disappointment. His speech was unimaginative at a time when we need bold, imaginative ideas and strategies, where action should be the key word and not action teams. I hope the Minister and his Department will tackle their responsibilities in relation to this question of employment creation with much greater vigour than they have shown during the past 12 months.

Mr. Keating

At the heart of this Estimate is a question which needs some attention. It relates to the actual function, concept and defination of a Minister for Labour. To the casual observer it is quite difficult to identify the face and function of the Minister through perhaps the fact is becoming more familiar. What precisely is his job? What should the Estimate for his Department be about? What parameters should it have and what basic vision should it embrace? It seems that the task of the Minister for Labour embraces a number of areas. Undoubtedly the question of job creation comes into it, as also does the question of industrial harmony and goodwill. The question of economic planning in a wider sense than job creation must be involved in his brief. Straight away there is a degree of confusion and misunderstanding of the role.

I have been reading the contributions to this debate and the Minister's speech places strong emphasis on all the areas I mentioned. Yet, in each of these areas with the exception of the industrial harmony dimension, we already have people who have committed themselves to certain goals and ambitions in these areas. With regard to the industrial and commercial aspect, the area in which the jobs are created, there is the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy and I am sure that there is close liaison between him and the Minister for Labour. It is not clear in Government thinking where precisely the ultimate responsibility rests for the job creation programme. This grey edge on the functions and definitions of Ministers may be partly responsible for the lack of cohesion and lack of drive in the way in which the Government are tackling some of the major tasks which they set themselves in their manifesto.

There can be no doubt that job creation, which is too simplistic a concept as embodied in those two words, is one of our major challenges. I would imagine that the primary responsibility of the Minister might or should be that of ensuring industrial harmony and peace. If that be the case, the Minister for Labour could be seen to be a referee acting between the organised workers, through unions and other organisations, and the employer bodies, such as the FUE. If he is cast in the mould of referee, it sometimes appears that the whistle does not have any pea in it, and I hope the Minister will not take that disrespectfully. His role does not appear to be very relevant. As often as not, it boils down to rather vague and general aspirations towards the common good and a reluctance to intervene or interfere because of the processes which endeavour to ensure industrial peace. The Minister's role in relation to retaining and ensuring industrial harmony is a little bit askew. I would question whether a Minister for Labour is merited at this stage in carrying out this function.

With regard to the question of economic planning generally, there is also confusion. The Minister is one of those involved in creating an economic infrastructure for the future. How can the Minister speak as he did about job creation while the Minister for Economic Planning and Development tell us—I suspect without a great deal of consultation—that he is proposing cutbacks in major areas which he chooses to call "non job producing" areas. This is a tragic oversimplification and perhaps it is a symptom of the way in which the Government and many others in our society are misjudging the whole basis of the unemployment problem as it is afflicting the so-called civilised western economies.

These so called "non job producing" areas are very valid job areas. Merely because they do not have at their end a tangible physical product, often a product which is essentially wasteful and usefully geared to the short-term economics of the consumer market, does not mean for a moment that the jobs therein are not very valuable, dignified and important and possibly one of the ways in which this problem could be solved. I am suggesting that the Minister for Labour and the Minister for Industry, Commerce and Energy are saddled with an outmoded notion based on the thinking of the industrial revolution and an industrial society, according to which jobs are irrelevant to our problem unless they create product at their end.

The Minister for Labour has a difficulty. When opening his newspaper, he is hoping not to read another speech from one of his colleagues and seeing the area in which he envisages developments being whittled away. The Minister for Finance could make certain valuable sounds in this area, as could the Taoiseach. It must be a very difficult job. One never knows precisely who one's friends are. I would imagine it must be a most unhappy experience to try to encourage the job creation area and find one or more of one's colleagues getting the public mind ready for major financial cutbacks, despite their expectations that the Government had the answers to the job problem. I do not gloat over the fact that the Government Party are failing lamentably to achieve even the modest job targets they set—those targets were based on an accepted level of unemployment.

There are Deputies here from all parts of the country and most of them travel to this assembly every week. As they do so they must see the vast potential need for jobs in all the towns and villages they pass. Yet we turn our hand on the human services and on this social need. We tell our young girls that if they want to do nursing they must go abroad because we do not have room in our hospitals while, at the same, our old people are dying alone. These are the areas that are being frowned on by some members of the Government. I do not believe that this is the thinking of the whole Government, but if it is it shows a very narrow and unhappy social wisdom with major inbuilt implications not just for jobs but for the peace and harmony of this country in the future. That very limited vision must be radically revised and overhauled.

I maintain that the area for which the Minister is primarily responsible, industrial harmony, is very important. I do not attribute to him exclusively or even largely the area of job creation. I suspect he would not be unhappy if the Opposition and the public generally did not do that over the next number of years either. He is the Minister for Labour, and that implies to any normal thinking person that labour relations, industrial peace and harmony and the fostering of an industrial relations environment which is conductive to high productivity, happy employment, fulfilled workers and all associated ideas, is the area for which he should accept primary responsibility.

We continually moan about the low productivity of an Irish worker. We talk about our high absenteeism rate and say we suffer from all kinds of industrial problems. We recognise and accept there are difficulties in this regard. We have a responsibility, and the Minister for Labour has a very challenging responsibility, to ask ourselves the basic reasons for this malaise. Is there a reason why the Irish worker is less productive? Of course there is a reason, if it can be shown that he or she produces less than his or her neighbours. One of the main reasons is that we have not really accepted in our thinking that we should have real industrial democracy. I do not mean the nominal placing of a statutory director from the workshop at boardroom level. I mean a genuine industrial democracy which would allow for sharing of real wealth, real profits and real responsibilities of companies, which would encourage and foster a major new leap-forward in ensuring that the now out-moded attitude of the industrial scene as being workers versus management or vice versa was killed once and for all. In that direction industrial chaos looms more and more. A great deal of that thinking—the thinking of them and us—is responsible for much of the real problems we are experiencing.

We still have incredible conditions attaching to our employees in this day and age. As late as three hours ago I spoke to two young ladies employed by Dublin Corporation as playground managers. Their jobs, like many others, are part time, temporary, with no sick pay. Their jobs can be terminated at an hour's notice. They have no pension rights and no status. These jobs give no respect to the workers. These people have been employed for the last seven years and their work is not part time or temporary. They have been employed for nearly a decade and work on average up to 40 hours a week. There is no excuse for retaining employees in the undignified and dissent-breeding conditions in which these workers are employed, and it is only symptomatic of many other similar type employees around the country.

For example, library assistants in some cases suffer the same fate. I know one library assistant who was employed as sole libarian in a country town and has been employed on a temporary and part-time basis for 3 years. Two years ago her salary was £16 a week and she worked five evenings a week until 8 o'clock. Her young niece started work in the local supermarket and came home with more money. I suspect this type of approach is rife. It should be noted that in the two examples I have quoted the employers were local authorities, not the private entrepreneur who often, in some people's eyes, is like a horned toad and can do no right although they, too, are responsible for a fair amount of exploitation.

On the Industrial Safety Bill earlier this week we heard that there were enormous numbers of people injured every year because their employment conditions were extremely unsatisfactory, injurious to health and could not be tolerated. How can you expect people working in these conditions, who have been conditioned to believe that unless they are employed they are parasites, who accept a job as if it were a charity and who are reluctant to complain about conditions in case they are dismissed, to give everything they have, to believe it is one for all and all for one? The first response of a major company to any suggestion of economic contraction will be that workers will be put on protective notice. They are pushed nearer the ledge, to be pushed over if the company wills it. In other words, they are seen as a temporary economic asset which can be dispensed with if the mood catches the board of directors, many of whom are not even resident in, or knowledgeable about, this country.

If we are to make any progress in industrial relations and I did not see a new approach to this in the Estimate —we must have a gigantic leap forward in relation to genuine industrial democracy, real sharing, not the nominal figurehead stuff we have been seeing in recent years. We will have to ensure that workers are intrinsically a part of a company sharing in all the rights, responsibilities and perks. It must be infuriating to the young girls employed as secretaries in some of these jobs and doing the jobs of the directors, while these directors are enjoying conditions of employment including expense accounts and other perks which would be all right if they applied to everybody, and as often as not they are not in their offices. It would be scandalous if a secretary, one of the junior employees or one of the shop floor people, were in two or three minutes late, but when the boss is not back from lunch at four o'clock nothing is said.

This attitude of seeing industrial society as two nations must stop. There is no point in the bosses who are in that situation pretending that they will include a nominal director to ensure worker representation. That is only a charade. It shows no respect for the worker. To carry on this attitude will achieve nothing and will increase industrial disharmony.

In relation to some of our State and semi State organisations such as CIE, surely it is possible to ensure that the workers have a real say at board room level instead of their being dictated to and instead of their hearing about new conditions too late to allow for minimum consultation. The day has gone when the workers will accept that type of action. They are entitled to a share of this earth and management should be restructured to ensure that they get their rights. If we continue in the old way we will continue with enormous numbers of unofficial strikes and so on which betray not that workers are irresponsible but that they are working in a situation which, because of the regular provocation, is liable to sudden eruptions, which do not allow for tedious negotiation. In relation to the post office situation we found that minor requests were being discussed over a period of years.

If the Minister considered having a full investigation and a funding of research for a totally new and wide dimension of genuine industrial democracy he might come closer to ensuring a generation of industrial peace. Anything less will not work. The worker is intelligent and responsible and is as often as not a married person with a family to support and he is not liable to fly off the handle at the slightest provocation. The person who goes on strike does so only after serious consideration. The workers should be treated with respect.

We are all workers but standards are different depending on what level one operates at. The differing standard is an indication of an attitude to class and to society which is no longer consistent with the enlightenment of the age we are now living in and it will not work.

In relation to the question of jobs and unemployment there is a clear lesson to be learned from the international and domestic unemployment tragedy which so far has been almost universally ignored. Because of the social and economic basis on which the Government operate they are the party least suited to making progress in this area. The old laissez faire approach to economics, hoping that independent economies will in some spontaneous way by their interaction create enough jobs on the day, is no longer adequate and is increasingly failing. Particularly vulnerable in this ailing tradition of massive Government incentive, which is basically a form of subsidising labour and profits, are the smaller economies such as Ireland's. In the Minister's constituency the IDA were willing to put forward £50 million to try to win about 800 jobs in the Ford factory but it did not work because somebody else bid higher.

Mr. G. Fitzgerald

The Deputy should get his statistics right.

Mr. Keating

I am sorry if I am wrong. The fact is that the job did not come to Cork because somebody else paid a higher price.

Mr. G. Fitzgerald

The Deputy should check his facts.

Mr. Keating

The 800 jobs did not appear and will not appear because Ford decided to go elsewhere.

Mr. G. Fitzgerald

That is not correct.

Mr. Keating

The Minister can tell me, when summing up, where I am wrong.

Mr. G. Fitzgerald

That concerns a different Minister and a different Department and the Deputy should not make an incorrect statement and not be able to stand over it.

Mr. Keating

Tell me where I am wrong?

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

It concerns a different Minister. The Minister in the House has no responsibility for the IDA.

Mr. Keating

I am talking about jobs.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Deputy is going over the whole field. The Minister has only limited responsibility as far as job creation is concerned. The Minister has a very limited amount of money for job creation.

(Interruptions.)

Mr. Keating

The misleading statments did not begin from this side of the House. In the last two weeks I had to correct one of the Minister's colleagues in relation to some of his statements. The Minister should not start lecturing me, nor should anyone else from that side of the House.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Deputy Keating, on the Estimate, please.

Mr. Keating

I am trying to deal with it.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Yes, but the Deputy will have to get away from the IDA in Cork. The provision of industries in Cork is a matter for another Minister.

Mr. Keating

If I am incorrect I regret it but the facilities I have as an employee here are not nearly as lavish or as adequate as those enjoyed by the Minister. Accordingly some of my facts and figures may not be 100 per cent accurate but they are uttered in good faith. If they are proved to be inaccurate I will have the courtesy to apologise.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

That is accepted, but the Deputy can raise that matter on another Estimate with another Minister.

Mr. Keating

The jobs in this case, based on a policy of industrial incentive to companies abroad and to local entrepreneurs, did not materialise for one reason or another. I can only surmise that the reason was that the price paid elsewhere was higher. With the increasing technology of the age this will become more and more evident. Yet the irony is that with a relatively small economy and population we cannot provide the basic needs, jobs, housing and proper conditions of employment. The Government of the day are responsible for all those things.

We have a major employment problem and the Minister for Labour is one of the Ministers responsible. Apparently, from the figures and facts that I spent hours trying to garner it transpires that we have the worst employment record in Europe. Young people account for approximately 42 per cent of the unemployment, the average incidence being three times as great as among the 25 to 64 age group. In the seven largest OECD countries there are almost six million young people listed as being unemployed. In the EEC alone there are three and-a-half million people in a similar predicament.

Ireland is feeling the brunt of this, like every other country. I am not trying to pretend that in the last nine or ten months since the Government came into office things have deteriorated because of their coming into office. I am not trying to blame any Government or any Minister, because I believe the pattern, the way of thinking about economics and job creation, is at fault. But this Government are showing all the signs of not having the knowledge or the vision to revise their basic thinking in this regard. If we are to comprehend the new social order which is emerging, the primary characteristic of which is a change from an industrial society to a technological one, we must learn that the old narrow thinking will have to go. We will have to take account of the vast impacts of trans-global flows of money, of men and ideas. We will have to meet a total new challenge to our society.

Providing incentives for employment is fine. If you open a jar of jam or of honey in the summer, wasps will be attracted to it but if you provide the same incentive in the middle of winter there will not be any wasps because the climate has changed radically here and we have not realised it. No matter how many incentives we provide we are doing so under false assumptions, first that it is the responsibility of the private sector to create jobs. That is untrue. Their primary interest is to create profit and that and job creation by no means can be synchronised, and the sooner the Government realise that the better.

The second thing is that profits of companies have increased substantially. The benefits they are getting from public funds in relation to schemes to create jobs has increased substantially. But the numbers of jobs have not increased because, of course, the employer, and I do not blame him, at the first opportunity will turn to technology, to capital intensive industries instead of employment intensive industries, when he gets the opportunity. That is what is happening.

We have not realised fully that the old order is changing and that there will never be a return to the scene of hordes of workers heading like drones into the factories of the Industrial Revolution. That has gone forever. That being the case, we should be asking many questions which we are not asking. For example, is the future hopeless? I do not think so. There is an infinite volume of work but we should not rely on the private sector exclusively, whose primary concern is profit, and not people, to produce jobs which do not have high monetary reward.

We should ask ourselves whether the prospect of creating jobs in the old traditional sense, the sense the Minister for Economic Planning and Development talked about, is a myth. We do not distinguish between creating a job and creating toil, and there is a distinction. I have not heard any Minister expressing concern about creating the right kind of jobs. The rush is to create the old type of jobs for the people now coming on stream, those leaving schools, those who are out of jobs, that is a futile exercise. If such jobs were useful or necessary any longer they would not have gone out of existence.

We had the clarion call about full employment in Fianna Fáil's preelection manifesto. The Government party committed themselves to a certain number of jobs to be created. But no matter how they juggle with statistics or fiddle with the register of unemployed, the truth is—and the people on the dole now know it—that the jobs are not being created. The saddest part is not that they are not being created but that the Government are not honest enough to admit it and to take the necessary remedial action.

This using of the unemployed as election bait is a disservice to the unemployed, to the young who look with hope to the future of democracy, and a disservice to the rest of us because it degrades men. If politicians looked into their hearts they would accept that the time has come to accept this and to consider an alternative to the full employment situation as we used to know it. The Industrial Revolution is giving way to a technological revolution. In my constituency the port of Dublin 11 or 12 years ago employed 160 men to move 20,000 tons of cargo. Containerisation and fork lift trucks now ensure that the same cargo can be moved by 11 people. Are containerisation and fork lift trucks therefore bad? Should we call a halt, put our finger in the dyke and pretend this is not a good thing? We should not.

We should understand that man was not born to be a beast of burden. If technology and science show us a new way to do the old toilsome jobs, that is a good thing. Where it fails, and where we are failing, is that we do not realise that the new challenge of the unemployed needs a new answer, but there is not an attempt being made to find that new answer. The jobs in the traditional sense are not there and they never again will be. Therefore a whole new definition of "employment" is necessary if we want to combat the traumatic social effects of increasing degradation and the stigma that attaches to people who are unemployed.

I ask the Minister why it is that an unfortunate man who through no fault of his own but through the operation of economic market forces finds himself out of a job and does the daily dull grind of door to door, factory to factory looking for work, eventually winds up without hope, self respect or dignity should be considered a parasite, less than his peers, because he was not able to afford a white shirt or did not know a slick friend who would get him into a job? We have more than 100,000 people of this order in our society and the future for them is a large vacuum. If they were to believe the politicians and statisticians they have no future—they are a drain on the rest of us to be shunned by us. Their children will no longer have pride in them because they are not as good as parents down the street who have jobs.

Why is that so? It is because the way we have approached the whole job creation jungle traditionally has become outmoded. These men are not parasites. They are a resource but there is nobody who has the imagination so to regard them. God knows there is enough work on which to use them. I do not refer to piecework, public work breaking stones, cutting wood, making roads. I am concerned primarily with urban areas and our biggest need is to stave off from our people alienation, loneliness, isolation.

Our answer is a massive programme of environmental standard improvements to get rid of the dereliction and the blight that are like cancers in our community. People are the answer and people we have, but not jobs, imagination or vision. That is because we have been thinking in terms of output, productivity, commercial profit—profit and loss all the time, a set of books at the end of the year.

I suggest a new definition of "employment" is needed. Employment means that a person is used or employed in work which is noble, useful to society, fulfilling to the individual and which has the dignity of the human being at its base. Many of the jobs that we are trying frenetically to create at any cost with a cricket score mentality are the opposite to what we should be trying to create and as soon as the first economic storm blows or as soon as the price is raised elsewhere they will collapse like a pack of cards despite the massive investment and the tax-free concessions on profits. We will have to continue to improve the production of this kind of job because there will always be a need for the traditionally productive job. The Government, the IDA, the Opposition and anybody else who try to help in this area are not to be commended if they can succeed. I am saying that that narrow pathway and the fruits of this approach in terms of numbers of jobs will no longer suffice to answer the enormous demographic problems being created by the numbers out of work and those who will look for work in the future. These young people will leave school and they will demand a stake in the community.

Many of the top global companies have demonstrated that catering for the entire human family no longer presents a major technical problem. It can be done fairly easily. We are moving towards such a situation and I would ask the Minister to consider that fact. Sometimes when we talk about long-term programmes we mean a fiveyear span. What is long term about five years? What about the future of our children and grandchildren? We have a right to be concerned about that. What will happen when 50 million people will be able to look after the rest of the population of 2,950 million because of improved technology and scientific progress? Will we be still in some corner of the globe trying to build outdated factories with warehouse-type jobs, on assembly lines that no longer mean anything, producing nothing except bored employees and monetary profit which has long since lost its meaning? That is a relevant question and it is at the heart of the Minister's concern with job creation, although it was not spelled out in the Estimate speech.

There will always be a need to create new jobs, both as we know them now and in a different way. I want every resource of the State put in that direction. That does not mean that we should exclude the possibility that the numbers we talk about will never again be there because science, the population explosion, demographic trends and technology indicate that this is not on any longer. I am only asking for an honest acceptance that the scenario I have outlined is a possibility. I believe it to be a certainty. But, if we accept that, it may be a possibility at least of a beginning.

The distinction between toil and work has not been clearly understood by the Government. Toil is work that diminishes the human being. Essentially it is exploiting because it treats man as a unit, as a number and it tosses him on the scrap heap when it has squeezed him dry, and sometimes even earlier than that if it suits the toilcreating entrepreneur.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

I must ask the Deputy to deal with the Estimate before the House. This is all very interesting and academic but it has little to do with the Estimate.

Mr. Keating

If I did not think the Minister for Labour was concerned with job creation I would not try to share these ideas.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Minister for Labour is concerned with job creation in a limited way. Another Minister is fully responsible for the provision of jobs and industry and so on.

Mr. Keating

Because it is in a limited way I am seriously concerned——

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

There is nothing limited about the fact that the Deputy has spent 40 minutes dealing with it.

Minister for Labour (Mr. G. Fitzgerald)

I knew the watch was giving the Deputy some trouble.

Mr. Keating

The picture I am trying to paint, which is fundamental, is that we are not facing up to the need to create jobs in a new way. Nobody can deny that the job opportunities are there. The present emphasis on industrial expansion is all very well, and it will yield some results, but at best it is only a partial answer. We must encourage the move towards industrial harmony as well as we can to ensure that workers are as satisfied and happy as they can be. We must also understand that it has certain obligations and responsibilities and part of these obligations is a new approach to industrial democracy that will employ profit-sharing and the ownership or part ownership of factories and companies by the workers.

It seems to me that the shift from the industrial society and the blue collar worker to the white collar worker has not been fully understood in the Estimate before the House. This transition from factory to technology will have a major fall-out in terms of the numbers out of work. I should like the Minister to concern himself in a new way with the dimensions of this problem. Obviously he will have to do this in conjunction with some of his colleagues, notably the Minister for Economic Planning and Development whose recent soundings in this area have been most distressing. In contravention of what the Taoiseach, the Minister for Finance, the Minister for Labour and other Ministers have said, apparently we are to witness cutbacks in fundamental areas of social and human need——

Mr. G. Fitzgerald

The Deputy should give the House the quotations.

Mr. Keating

The Minister may borrow a few of them if he wishes but I do not think they are germane to his philosophy. That is the point I am getting at. This underlines the distinction between the Government and the Opposition. The last thing this side of the House would accept is a cutback in education or in housing——

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

It is not germane to this Estimate.

Mr. Keating

I do not know how it is but whenever I get to the heart of the matter I am always accused of being out of order.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Deputy is not being accused of anything. He is being told——

Mr. Keating

The Chair is very hard on me.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

That it not so.

Mr. Keating

The Estimate deals with job creation to a substantial degree and that is what I am talking about.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Estimate covers a very wide field and job creation, so far as this Minister is concerned, has only a limited function in the Estimate.

Mr. Mitchell

The Chair has said it.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

It concerns another Minister.

Mr. Keating

Even in the context of the limited dimension with which the Minister for Labour is concerned——

Mr. Mitchell

That is the point the Deputy is making.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

Deputy Keating is able to make his own points—in fact he can make them on everything except the Estimate before the House.

Mr. Keating

Even in the fairly constricted dimension of job creation with which the Minister for Labour is concerned, I should like to quote from a book entitled The Service Society and the Consumer Vanguard as follows:

Continuous industrial growth is leading to unemployment and under-utilisation of people. By contrast, growth in the human services will lead to the fullest such utilisation. A balanced ecological society does not call for lack of growth but rather a shift to the human services.

In this area of human services—by which I mean an area that involves a substantial investment of people in the area of human need—would the Minister recommend this to his colleagues as an area of enormous job potential? In our cities and towns there are old people some of whom will die alone, but yet there are young people on street corners waiting for jobs. Young girls have to leave the country to go nursing. We have geriatrics in old people's homes. We have families under stress in a way that did not happen before. There is a need for a social care network that is unprecedented.

In the education area we constantly decry the pupil-teacher ratio. We decry underinvestment in the housing area. In many other associated areas there is the exciting, exhilarating challenge of putting people into useful roles— not just the temporary, assembly-line type of jobs, which apparently it is now fashionable to talk about creating and which in a very short time will prove to be counterproductive, will lead to more workers being disgruntled and more problems for the Minister for Labour, who has enough problems at the moment. The right kind of job and its usefulness to society is very important, but this is getting very little consideration by the Government and in this Estimate.

It is necessary to draw up a national programme for the development of our resources—mineral, land and sea. We are told fairly reliably that there are about three-and-a-half million acres of derelict land in the country, sites which are not being used. Could the Minister not look to this area in relation to getting new jobs? There is a need for decent services in our community, social services, innovations in education——

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

The Deputy is covering every Estimate under the Government at the moment. We have gone through Health, Social Welfare, Education, the Environment —the whole lot of them. Would the Deputy get back to the Estimate before the House, please?

Mr. Keating

If I do that I shall have to do it on the note that the brief of the Minister for Labour is illequipped and ill-designed to deal with the major problems confronting us in the employment sector. The structuring of government and the ordering of business in this House does not allow a trans-departmental approach to the question of creating jobs. I am confined here to dealing in a very narrow way with a problem which is far from narrow and has its roots in many of the Departments of Government which the Leas-Cheann Comhairle says I am referring to.

An Leas-Cheann Comhairle

No, I am saying to the Deputy that the speech he is making would be appropriate, for instance, to the budget debate or an adjournment debate. When you are dealing with an Estimate you must remain with what that Minister is responsible for and nothing else.

Mr. Keating

I take your point, but I am trying to assist the Minister to find ways and means to create jobs. If that is out of order then I think we should pack our bags and go home. When we consider that there are many people hungry and without homes, that there is a massive problem of social alienation of many kinds and that we still have a job problem, it is obvious we have not got the equation right. I do not care what Department or what Estimate that is appropriate to.

The Estimate of the Department of Labour does not embody a basic sense of philosophic vision in relation to employment. It only deals with the economics of the Department of Labour and does not deal in a real way with its role in the community, its function in creating jobs. If it did it would embody some thought relating to the kind of ideas I have been trying to put forward, despite the harassment I have been under.

"Wealth" is an interesting word. What does it mean? Why does increased production not lead to increased wealth among the ordinary people? Growth around the world has been improving on an average of 5 per cent or 6 per cent. This should mean that people would have real wealth of an increased order of 5 or 6 per cent per annum. In the western countries the ordinary man in the street should be five times wealthier this year than he was last year.

Is that happening? Profits are going up, but is the man in the street, the man who goes on a lightning strike, the man about whom the Minister is concerned, twice as wealthy every 20 years? Colleges and institutions, hospitals and schools should be twice as wealthy, but they are not because we have not grasped the idea that the wealth of our nation belongs to all the people. The Department of Labour have a responsibility to ensure a very fundamental revision of thought in relation to the way in which wealth and resources are allocated. As the Department of Labour are presently structured and with the limitations placed on them by other Ministers, who seek to be the dominant luminaries on the economic landscape, they are not equipped to deal with the problem.

We have an increasing number of people out of work despite the best efforts of everybody. I wish the Minister every success in trying to combat the problem; but, for some of the reasons I have tried to hint at I do not believe we are on the right track. We face the prospect of millions of people unemployed. It is not too much to ask the Government to face up to the enormous social implications of this for the health of our community, people in jobs, industrial relations and for the very order of our society. If this vast pool of people are allowed to languish unemployed the result will be more people disgruntled and we will eventually have a situation leading to incipient revolution.

I am sure strikes are a major concern of the Minister. I do not have a monopoly of wisdom about that except to say that a strike takes place only after serious thought. The impression is being given by the Government—I wonder if it is being deliberately fostered—that the source of trouble in regard to strikes is the unions. I do not propose to deliver a lecture on the origins of trade unionism, even if it was in order. The whole philosophy, the raison d'etre of the trade union movement is a reaction to the excess of capitalist exploitation. The momentum is still there because the exploitation is still there. The abuse of people still exists in our cities and towns. As long as that continues trade unions will be healthy and will flourish. I do not share the attitude of the Government to trade unions, seeing them, apparently, as a bit of a nuisance, the attitude of threatening that, unless they tighten their belts, remedial action will be taken. That is a reasonable interpretation of the attitude of some Ministers in recent times, of the Minister for Finance and others, and the Minister for Labour will therefore have an increasingly difficult job if the big stick is now to be wielded over the trade unions. I would ask him to consider seriously whether or not he is in a sense being set up because, if the present thinking and the present trend continue, what will undoubtedly happen is that there will be a major confrontation between Government and the unions in the foreseeable future.

I have no doubt that my colleagues on the opposite benches, having listened attentively to what I have had to say, will have learned something. The few ideas I have put forward were seriously meant. I had no intention of being either provocative or unhelpful.

Minister for Labour (Mr. G. Fitzgerald)

I want to thank Members for their contributions and to say that the many serious and sincere points made will be seriously considered. Some political points were made and some of them I will have to reply to in order to correct the wrong impressions given by some speakers. The two main features referred to were employment and industrial relations. Other functions of the Department did not seem to merit the same attention. Undoubtedly unemployment is the greatest problem for us as a nation but, in the time at my disposal now, I could not deal adequately with the matter. I shall do so when the debate resumes.

I should like to correct an impression conveyed this morning—by Deputy Kerrigan, I think—because of certain inferences drawn from my speech, inferences which are without foundation. I endorse what he said about the majority of Irish workers. It is something I myself have said many, many times. The vast majority of Irish workers move along smoothly each day. They make their contribution very quietly. It is a most important contribution and, as I say, the vast majority working in Irish industry move ahead without difficulty.

Deputy Kerrigan also referred to the importance of the personnel function. Again I endorse what he said. It is a most important function. I think it was Deputy Keating, in one of the few moments when he touched on the Estimate, who referred to instant solutions. There are no instant solutions in industrial relations. Industrial relations are the result of hard work on both sides directed towards setting up satisfactory grievance procedures and good negotiating machinery. The personnel function is deserving of more attention and it is now achieving the importance it deserves with the result that we now have the excellent performance to which I referred. There is need for improvement. Some speakers seemed to think there was no room for improvement. There is room and there is need for improvement. I am surprised that only one speaker referred to the setting up of the Commission on Industrial Relations. I believe this is a substantial advance. The commission is manned by experienced practitioners who have served their apprenticeships and know the problems of industrial relations. I look forward to this body improving in the long term our industrial relations structure.

Reference was made to the Labour Court. Some people suggested changing the concept of the court. I join with those who paid tribute to the Labour Court for the part it has played over a long period of years. It has made a wonderful contribution to industrial relations. However, after more than 30 years in operation, it is time now to review the functions of the court, and how it operates, to find out whether or not there should be some changes made. I am asking the Commission on Industrial Relations to give me an interim report on the Labour Court and its functions

Debate adjourned.