When I was introducing this Bill on Second Reading in the Dáil and the Seanad, I expressed the opinion that it was a mistake ever to have attempted to deal with the conditions of employment of hotel workers in a Shops Act. I came to that conclusion before the original Shops Act had passed through the Oireachtas. In the course of the discussions, on the Committee Stage in the Dáil and here, it became obvious that so many difficulties were going to arise out of an attempt to apply the same conditions of employment to hotel workers as were proposed to be applied to shop workers, that we should never have begun the process. I intended, when introducing this Bill, to repair that mistake by taking hotel workers altogether out of the Act.
The experience of the years during which the Act has been in operation has shown that the great majority of hotel employers could not obey the Act, that it was literally impossible for them to do so, and inspectors of the Department reported frequently that the Act could not be enforced because the circumstances of employment in many classes of hotels were such that the conditions required by the Act could not be met by hotel proprietors. That general argument is still true, but it was pointed out to me by representatives of workers and in the Dáil that the general argument did not apply with all its force in the City of Dublin and, on that account, I agreed to amend the legislation in the Dáil by retaining the hotel workers in the City of Dublin within the scope of the Principal Act, but only the hotel workers in the City of Dublin.
In Dublin City there are special circumstances. Most of the trade done by hotels in the city is steady, all the year round trade. The conditions of employment in Dublin City have been arranged by agreement with the unions catering for the hotel workers on much the same lines as were contemplated in the original Act. The difficulty that has arisen in most parts of the country arose mainly out of the fact that there was not available a pool of workers on which hotel proprietors could draw when they required additional staffs in order to conform to the terms of the Act, giving the hours of work and the periods of rest which the original Act contemplated. These conditions do exist in the City of Dublin. It is possible in Dublin for the employers to conform to the Act.
The same conditions that apply in Dublin do not apply elsewhere and, while I would have preferred that we would have tackled this problem of hotels—and I agree that there is need to tackle it—in a separate measure, I was willing to accept a proposal that, for the time being, at any rate, the position in respect to Dublin should be left unchanged.
I do not think, however, it can be argued that the conditions that exist in Dublin are reproduced in Cork, Limerick or Waterford. The mere fact that these are county boroughs does not mean that the conditions are the same as in Dublin, and, in fact, in these centres not merely have difficulties been experienced in enforcing the Act, but I think the trade union organisers, who had secured similar conditions to those contemplated by the Act for Dublin, had failed entirely to get them observed in these centres, because of the comparative scarcity of trained hotel workers and other difficulties. In Dublin, as everybody knows, there is a sort of floating staff of trained waiters and other hotel workers who are more or less in constant employment in connection with public dinners and social functions of one kind or another, who are given employment in hotels as required, particularly because the provisions of the Act require the enforcement of terms of leave for their employees and so on, and because of the existence of that pool of skilled workers, on which the proprietors can draw, it has been possible for them to conform to the Act in Dublin.
Similar circumstances do not exist in other centres and, consequently, the difficulties in enforcing the Act there were considerable. I would ask the Senator not to press this amendment because I think it would be impossible to apply the principles of the original Act in these other centres. I do not think they have been applied and, in fact, I think there has been evasion of the terms of the Act in these other centres. In my opinion, it is altogether undesirable that we should have a situation of having an Act upon the Statute Book requiring certain conditions of employment and hours of work which everybody knows cannot be obeyed and which, in fact, are not obeyed. Everybody will agree that there are circumstances associated with hotel employment in this country which require to be rectified by legislation, and I think that at some stage we should tackle the job of trying to devise legislation which will fit the varying conditions of hotels catering for different types of clients and in different parts of the country. I think that we could do it and that we should do it, although it will have to be an Act to provide for all the various types of hotels that exist, such as the city hotel which caters for clients all the year around, the hotel in the smaller urban centres whose main business is associated with commercial travellers and such people, and the hotel in the rural districts whose trade is only seasonal and carried on during the summer months. The conditions which must apply to these hotels, obviously, will vary according to the nature of the trade done, and I think we can consider that separately in a separate Act relating to hotel employees, as I think we should have done in the very beginning. The initial mistake was to attempt to deal with hotel workers in a Shops Bill. That has been rectified, but I agreed to leave Dublin unchanged until we got special legislation.