I am quoting from a newspaper of two days ago and I cannot be much more up-to-date than that. It would appear, in the light of the figure which Senator Halligan mentions, that probably the British percentage increase is 80 per cent, whereas with us it is nearer 90 per cent. I shall refer to the British figure later because it bodes ill for what is likely to happen in our case in the coming months. This is an important factor in relation to certain sections in this Bill.
In some ways this Bill is unsatisfactory. It is extraordinarily vague. There is nothing in it to suggest who will receive these premiums, how much they will be, or what industries will benefit. It gives the Minister power, at his complete discretion, to fix the rates of premium. The House has been told in the recent budget statement, and again by the Minister today, that initially the figure will be £12 and during the last three months it will be reduced to £6, but this is not contained in the Bill. The Minister can decide what workers will or will not qualify. That information is not contained in the Bill, except that the Minister has the complete power to decide these matters; not even by order or regulation but by an administrative decision which need not be referred back to the Oireachtas. He can decide what employers will qualify. Up to now he has limited himself to manufacturing industry. He has now said he is going to extend this, but nonetheless within the limitations that, in manufacturing industry, on the one hand, and agriculture, on the other, he can pick out individual employers anyway he likes and say they qualify or they do not qualify. Even where he has picked out groups of workers, groups of employers, industries and so on, he can vary his decisions on these heads in individual cases. In effect, the Minister can spend public money as he pleases without any element of legislative control.
As Senator Lenihan has already said, we would be very glad to give the Minister greater powers if he had taken greater powers than these to deal to a greater extent with the massive unemployment with which we are faced than is proposed in this relatively limited field. However, any such powers ought to be set out in the Bill and therefore be subject to legislative control.
We have heard today from the Minister some very brief details of how these proposals will work. Until today we had to rely on a handout from the Government Information Services. One wonders why this handout was not circulated to Members of the Oireachtas. Apparently anybody else in the country can get it but not the people who are supposed to be enacting this legislation. This handout, issued on 26th June, by the Government Information Services begins rather curiously by saying "Subject to Dáil approval the following provisions will apply". Whatever about the Seanad, the Dáil have never been asked to approve any of this because it is not in the Bill. Neither the Seanad nor the Dáil have any power of approval of the details of a scheme which are sent around the country in this form by the Government Information Services.
The only information we have about these measures is when they will start and when they will end but we have no information about the intervening 12 months. Therefore we have to assume the statement from the GIS is correct, together with what the Minister has told us today. It is on this basis that we have to consider the Bill and on that basis one must accept that the scheme is disappointing. There are varied respects in which the proposed scheme is entirely unsatisfactory. Because of these deficiencies it will not achieve anywhere near the effect in relieving unemployment that it should.
First of all—and this has been referred to by Senator Lenihan—the date fixed in the scheme relating to the level of the work force is June 29th, 1975. This is almost making a lottery out of this whole affair. A factory employing, say, 200 people on June 29th, will be paid premiums only in respect of workers taken on beyond the figure of 200. A factory that closes down in July, September or November of 1975 or anytime next winter cannot qualify for the premiums unless at some stage it passes the level of its work force on June 29th. This deals, in other words, with past history only, not with the future. It does not deal with the true life situation of increasing redundancies, increasing unemployment which, for various reasons, is almost certain to hit us during the coming winter.
Even if it is the past history, it is very much a case of hit or miss. Take the case of a factory that closed in May and happens to re-open briefly towards the end of June; if it was employing its normal complement on June 29th and then after a month or so closes down again, perhaps in July, it does not qualify. It gets no benefit in the Bill. What is more important, its workers get no benefit from the Bill. The assumption all through the scheme is that June 29th, not merely in the country as a whole but in relation to each individual industry, is the bottom of the trough, that there will be no cuts in the work force after that date. There is no evidence that this is the position. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary.
Last month the Confederation of Irish Industry—the people who are very much affected by the operation of this scheme—issued a bulletin called Economic Trends in which they suggested that the prospects for the rest of this year are that production and employment will continue to decline. They said that demand is not expected to pick up and home sales will decline still further; that there is some hope that exports will show some slight increase but that even this measured optimism must be tempered by the deflationary effect of the proposed British counter-inflation measures which were announced recently. In the centre pages of this document, the CII produced four extremely gloomy graphs. The first is of production trends, and in each case these graphs are the result of the expectations expressed by the various industries taking part in the survey. Where the figures are available they show the actual result as opposed to the results of the surveys, and in each case the actual results were shown over past months to have matched very closely the survey expectations of the industries concerned. Production trends are expected to continue to decline, a straight graph down the page. It is the same with employment trends and export trends. This survey, of course, was made before the announcement of heavy deflation by our neighbour, Great Britain, so that the actual figure there will probably be even worse than it is expected to be. We know that manufacturing exports so far this year have been well below last year in volume. The expected trend for home sales is down, and they point out that here there are particular problems because the final 4 per cent average tariff against British imports was removed on July 1st, and then next winter the import prices of the old EEC and other non-British products will fall by 10 per cent on January 1st next.
The indications are that things will not get better in the employment field but in autumn and winter they are likely to get worse. Indeed, the CIF Newsletter of 15th July said:
It is evident that Irish industry is facing exceptionally difficult trading conditions. These are likely to get worse at the end of 1975.
Under these conditions it is very difficult to understand why the base stage, if one can use the term, of June 20th has been fixed in this Bill. It simply means that any deterioration—and a deterioration is almost certain to take place—this autumn and winter means that the industries concerned would not qualify for these premiums, except in the restricted cases where they can show an actual increase of employment over June 20th last.
At this stage I might mention, as Senator Lenihan already has, that apart altogether from manufacturing industries and agriculture, which are not being brought in by the Minister, there is very serious unemployment also in service industries, particularly of course those related to tourism. There is also very severe unemployment—perhaps more severe than in any other single sector—in the building industry. One can see obviously that there are practical difficulties in covering these, but now that the Minister has decided to cover agriculture the practical difficulties of covering these other sectors would appear to be no greater than those for agriculture.
In the present emergency the Minister should face the risk that possibly some public money might go astray. If it is not possible to frame a cast-iron scheme which would cover every possible eventuality, he should certainly leave himself at least scope for covering any aspect of the economy. I have not seen his amendments so I do not know what form they will take. I hope they will take the form not merely of adding agriculture to the existing provisions of the Bill relating to manufacturing industry but that he will leave himself in a position whereby he can extend this scheme to any section of the economy. It does not commit him to doing so, but he should give himself the power. He would be very unwise to limit himself in any way in this respect. We will certainly try to draft amendments for the Committee Stage which will secure this result.
I doubt if the cost will be very great, particularly in the light of the obvious saving of those who come off the register. Every man and woman off the unemployment register saves the State money. The actual total cost of this to the State will probably be small. The basic point is that this is intended to deal with the very serious evil of massive unemployment. The Minister should if necessary even take risks in order to ensure that no section of the economy that might otherwise be covered fails to be covered.
Another point in this Bill which is difficult to understand is the provision that no worker should be entitled to be covered by a premium unless he has been four weeks on the register as a general rule. This is not in the Bill but it has been stated in the various announcements made about the form this scheme will take. This is difficult to understand. Take the position, for example, of a man perhaps in some provincial town who loses his job on a Friday in one local industry and another industry, perhaps the only other one there may be, offers him a job starting the following Monday. Normally he would be delighted to take it, but under present circumstances with the £12 premium payable the other industry could not afford to take him. That industry would, if necessary, go 20 miles away to take on a man who had been four weeks on the register. It is difficult to understand what the purpose of this is, particularly in view of the fact that the first few days, the first week or so, of unemployment is always the most traumatic. One would have thought that there would be a very good case to be made on that ground alone for allowing a man to be taken off the register at once rather than make him wait four weeks.
As I have already said, it is difficult to understand why the actual figures of £12 and £6 are not mentioned in the Bill. One wonders if the Minister intends perhaps to vary the figures? Does he intend to give himself that power? If he does, then perhaps he can put up a case for that. But if he intends to stick rigidly to the £12 and £6 which have already been announced— £12 up to March 31st next and £6 thereafter—it is very difficult to understand why he cannot put these in the Bill.
On the other hand, one wonders why it is intended to have fixed figures of this kind at all. The problem with the fixed £12 and £6 is that in the case of low-paid workers particularly —in the case of women working in textile industries for example—the £12 is obviously a very considerable incentive for an industry to take in workers. On the other hand, in the case of skilled workers, who might be earning £45, £50 or more a week, the £12 is of relatively minor importance and would only have a marginal effect in encouraging an industry to take in a worker. Here again one feels that the Minister should allow himself more flexibility. We propose to put down an amendment to try to devise some system whereby the Minister would have the power to fix a percentage of the wage rather than an outright figure of £12 or £6. As things stand it seems that certain industries may well benefit considerably from this, but others could benefit very little.
There is also the point that from the point of view of the workers, those who are on the unemployment register, who when at work earn a low wage—perhaps in a textile industry or something of that kind—under the pay-related scheme would come out relatively well and in some cases not far off 100 per cent of their former wage, whereas skilled workers on a much higher wage get a smaller proportion of their wage. To this extent skilled workers suffer still more when unemployed.
There is a strange provision in section 4 that I find difficult to understand. It is subsection (3) of section 4 which states that:
... the Scheme may provide for the reduction or non-payment of an employment premium in a case where the Minister is satisfied that the employer concerned is in receipt of, or has received, moneys by way of a grant or loan from any body established by statute for the purpose of promoting, encouraging or assisting employment or industry.
The Minister, of course, has discretion here but nonetheless he is given the power, in effect, to withhold premiums from industries which have benefited either from the IDA or even, which is still more extraordinary, from Fóir Teoranta. I am not saying that he proposes to do this but he is giving himself the power and one wonders what the purpose of it is. I can hardly believe that he proposes to eliminate industries benefiting from Fóir Teoranta because obviously one might forget about the Bill in that case. It appears from some remarks he has made in the course of the passage of this Bill through the other House that he proposes to eliminate in some cases the payment of premiums where money is still being paid by the IDA. I find it difficult to understand the purpose of this. After all, we are interested in this scheme in providing employment. I cannot see that the niceties of the Department of Finance relating to public money being spent in industry should affect this in any way. I would be glad to have some kind of an explanation of the meaning of this part of the Bill.
However, in relation to the points of the Bill which, as I suggested, are less than satisfactory, if the Minister is prepared to make changes in these, the scheme could well have a real chance of cutting, to some extent at least, the number of jobless in the country. As it stands, with the Minister's new amendment, we can certainly support it as a relatively small step forward, but one must accept that it is no substitute for the really radical and energetic steps that the Government ought to be taking.