That does not matter. The Minister might have introduced the Bill at any time. He was aware of the fact that the Bill would be favourably received by all Members of the House. Perhaps he will arrange to have the provisions of the Bill backdated to the date of its introduction. That would help matters a little. The agricultural workers suffered a disappoinment because they thought they would get an extra day's holidays at Christmas.
The proposed qualification for public holidays for agricultural workers is 125 hours in five weeks immediately preceding the holiday. This qualification may be varied by Ministerial regulation. If the Bill is enacted in its present form there will be three different ways of calculating holidays for agricultural workers. This may have escaped the Minister's notice. I am sure the Minister will agree with me that it is not desirable that this should be so. Such a situation would lead to confusion and to unnecessary disputes regarding holiday entitlement. A worker working 125 hours in the month preceding a public holiday is entitled to the holiday irrespective of lost time but if he was absent for four days, due to injury or illness, he would not then be entitled to one day of his annual holidays. I do not know why it should be necessary to have a regulation like this included in the Bill. Why not make it 125 hours in a month for both annual holidays and those which would be statutory holidays when they are introduced? This is one of the things which could be dealt with.
Holiday pay for public holidays is defined in the Bill as a full day's pay but a different method of calculating holiday pay applies to annual holidays. Again, surely the Minister should try to do something to have this tightened up?
I would also suggest that the Minister might avail of the passage of the Bill through the House to modify the Agricultural Wages Act, 1936, so as to empower the Agricultural Wages Board to fix overtime. I do not know whether the Minister is aware or not but there is an advice given to the Agricultural Wages Board that they have not at present the legal right to fix overtime rates.
I think the Agricultural Wages Board should also be entitled to prescribe minimum conditions of employment which would extend to the payment of wages during a period when the worker is engaged on a farm training course or is absent due to illness. It is prescribed that a worker, if he is on an apprenticeship course, can be paid his wages but in the case of an adult who goes on a farm training course there is no provision under which he is entitled by law to be paid for it. This is something which might possibly be straightened out.
When the Bill was first introduced —this possibly may be the reason why the Minister deferred dealing with it for so long—the Labour Party prepared 38 amendments with the object of compressing three holiday Acts and several Orders into this Bill but, having considered it and there being always the danger of a dissolution with the result that we might not get the Bill through the House, we have decided to withdraw all except two. We have two amendments which we will put before the House and if the Minister wants to have the Bill taken today, both amendments can be inserted at a few moments notice and we can have them discussed because we are seriously perturbed about the danger of this Bill being hung up somewhere until the dissolution and then we will have to start all over again. If we were introducing a Bill, we would introduce a better Bill. That will come. The amendments are not contentious. I can give the Minister a copy so that he may have a look at them while I am speaking.
We consider, for instance, that section 7 should be amended to enable a trade union official to recover money due to a worker who is a member of a trade union. This is in the Conditions of Employment Act, 1944. There is no reason why this also should not be included in this Bill.
We believe that there should be added to section 12 a subsection which would give power, when the Agricultural Wages Board is fixing a minimum rate, to provide a differential rate in the case of overtime and to determine what employment will be treated as overtime employment and also to prescribe minimum rates for sick pay. In the 1966 Act "wages" includes overtime, sick pay and holiday remuneration. This could possibly be done.
Section 11 is proposed for enactment because of unnecessary restriction in the Agricultural Workers (Weekly Half-Holidays) Act, 1952. There would have been no need to enact the legislation in 1951 and 1952 if the Agricultural Wages Act had given the board power to define what employment should be regarded as overtime employment. The counsel's opinion that I referred to earlier says that the Agricultural Wages Act, 1936, does not purport to control or specify special classes of employment or prescribe conditions of employment or create terms of employment which give rise to overtime; that these are matters left to be legislated between the contract made between employer and worker in every case. This makes it clear.
The right of the Agricultural Wages Board to fix overtime is not there. The former Agricultural Wages Board for Ireland, which functioned between 1917 and 1921, had power to define what overtime employment was and every wage-fixing body in these islands has such power except the Agricultural Wages Board. We feel, for that reason, that there should be no objection to having this done by the Agricultural Wages Board and that will remove another of the claims which are made, rightly we believe, by farm workers that the State seems to discriminate against them and that they are being treated as second-class citizens.
We know what happened when the Holidays (Employees) Act was introduced. A special Bill had to be introduced for farm workers. Why they could not be treated like everyone else, we do not know. An effort is now being made to bring them up. The Minister should not forget that, while we are now legislating for a minimum of 18 days holidays for farm workers, industrial workers have had for a number of years a minimum of 18 days and have, in fact, negotiated in most cases at least 24 days with the result that before very long, I am sure, this Dáil will have before it a Bill to legalise a minimum of 21 days annual holidays for other workers. When that comes I hope the agricultural workers will be included. This is only tightening up the process.
As we know, the Taoiseach recently has advised employers to treat all employees alike. I wonder will the Government care to remove the remaining anomaly from the wage-fixing legislation for agricultural workers, that is, the question of hours. It is no accident that normal hours of work in agriculture to which minimum rates apply have remained at 50 since 1949—50 in the summer, 44 in the winter, an average of 48. I do not think that the Minister can in any way get away from the responsibility for allowing this situation to continue. It is no answer to say that, of course, farm workers are needed for 50 hours in the summer. Of course they are needed for 50 hours but, of course, the reason they are kept at 50 is that apparently they have been allowing successive Governments to leave the situation the way it is. If the working hours are reduced as they should be to 42½, which is the standard for most rural employments at the present time, the farmer may have to pay a few hours overtime but in view of the low wage which agricultural workers get, even though they have got an increase of 30/- per week this year, the few hours overtime would help some of them to be able to balance their own weekly budget.
It is interesting, of course, to find that some people are not even prepared to pay the minimum agricultural rate to persons who are normally referred to as farm workers. Take for instance the millionaire, sometimes American, sometimes German, sometimes Irish, sometimes British, who is running a racing stable here. The Agricultural Wages Board say, rightly, that the workers employed doing normal farm work at these stables are not agricultural workers within the meaning of the Act. So, very many of these people did not get the recent increase of 30/- per week. Many of them are still working at scandalously low wages, even lower than the wages being paid to State employees, and that is bad enough. The reason is that the Agricultural Wages Board have under the Agricultural Wages Acts of 1936 and 1945 and the Holidays Acts of 1950 and 1961 the definition that an agricultural worker is a person employed under a contract of service or apprenticeship whose work under such contract is or includes work in agriculture and a person whose work under any such contract is mainly domestic service is not an agricultural worker; that an agricultural employer is a person who carries on the trade or business of agriculture and who employs other persons as agricultural workers for the purposes of such trade or business; and that the word "agriculture" includes dairy-farming and the use of land as grazing, meadow, or pasture land or orchard or osier land or woodland or for market gardens or nursery grounds. This is the definition.
The unfortunate farm worker who is employed on some of these jobs is not considered a farm worker if his employer is not an agricultural employer. An extraordinary thing one finds is that a man may be employed and doing everything the Act says he should do as an agricultural worker but, because his employer is not himself normally an agricultural employer, he does not come under the Act. You have these people sliding out.
Since the last increase, I have had a number of complaints from people who have not received the increase. I am sorry to say that, included in the list, were employees of racing stables, men who are employed around hotels or big houses looking after what is known as pleasure grounds and I am especially sorry to have to say one priest's boy who was not employed, he was told, as an agricultural worker. If there is any loophole left by which people who do not want to pay a fair wage are allowed to opt out, I think these loopholes should be plugged. It is not every day that we get an Act like this before the House. We had a reference during Question Time to Moses striking the rock. I think we could say here that it has been as difficult to get legislation before this House to help the farm workers as it was for Moses to see the Promised Land because we have been for a long time attempting to get something definite done about farm workers.
The Minister referred to the man who is being paid a lower rate because of what is known as a certificate of exemption. There should be some way of allowing him to opt in as a normal worker: I agree entirely with it. There should be some better system of considering who is or who is not entitled to a certificate of exemption. It is surely galling to find some hefty big fellow working for a boy's wage because he may have an impediment in his speech or he may not be able to write his name or to count and it is considered that because of that, they are entitled to give his employer a certificate of exemption and to get cheap labour. That is what it amounts too.
I believe that the Bill now before the House could and should have been used by the Government, the Minister, to tidy up a lot of items which have been left untidied for many years. Particularly, I believe that something should be done to ensure that the Bill will give a lead in regard to the number of hours which these people work.
The suggestion that there should be a reduction in the period during which the regional committees get an opportunity of looking at—or supposedly looking at—conditions in their area and sending in a recommendation, from two months to one month, is good. I suggest the Minister could go further. He could wipe out the regional committees altogether. If he looks at the records of the Agricultural Wages Board and finds that the board have in fact carried out the recommendations of the majority of those committees at any time during the period, then I would say he is right. However, if my information is correct, at no time did the regional committees recommend anything, as a majority, which resulted in the board's making the decision in favour of what they recommended. As a matter of fact, we have had over the years such things as a recommendation for an increase of 5/- from one committee and an increase of £2 from another committee—both supposed to be dealing with the same type of worker.
I suggest that one of the reasons regional committees do not work so well is because the type of people put on, admirable though they may be, are not people who represent agricultural workers. It is ridiculous to suggest that, if the regional committees are to continue, we should, for instance, put a road ganger who never worked for a farmer in his life—his father may be a farmer—to represent farm workers on the committee. There is the famous case in County Cavan where a workers' representative on a regional committee, who possibly might have worked for a farmer, had worked for years as a builder's labourer in Birmingham; still, he was retained as a workers' representative on the regional committee.
The votes are taken of the number of people present. There is an evening-off on the joint industrial councils—if a workers' representative is missing, the employers' representative drops out. This makes the chairman and the people with him responsible for making a decision if it is not a unanimous decision. With the Agricultural Wages Board, it is a straight vote: whoever turns up—OK; if they do not turn up —they are letting the side down. If they are not interested, why should they turn up unless it is that they are getting their expenses to Dublin or to Ballyshannon or to somewhere for the day?
I am sure the Minister is as interested as I am in having a fair code fixed for agricultural workers. I do not think the present set-up allows that to happen. The Minister knows that while the board itself has, for the past few years, improved considerably in its recommendations, there is a proviso that the chairman of the board is a quorum if nobody turns up but himself. Then, on his own, he can take a decision affecting the wages of agricultural workers. I do not think there can be anything more ridiculous than that.
We are terribly anxious to get this Bill through the Oireachtas. If the Minister is prepared to discuss the amendments here with an offer to introduce them even in the Seanad— something like that—we are prepared from these benches to give him all Stages of this Bill this afternoon so long as he remembers that the primary object of the Bill is to give natural justice to the people who are engaged in the primary industry of this country. It annoys me when I hear people talk about our primary industry being agriculture and then going along and giving the crumbs that fall from the table to those engaged in agriculture.
It might have been said—though I would never agree—that people employed as farm workers were people who just did rough, unskilled work. I personally believe they always required a certain amount of training. They had to know about crop rotation, what type of crop would suit a particular soil, and so on. At present, perhaps 80 per cent of farm workers—in addition to knowing certain agricultural basic facts—must also be mechanics. When a piece of machinery goes out of order they must be able to fix it or else to keep it going until somebody can come to repair the machine properly. It is a serious matter if a machine breaks down on a farm and the nearest town is many miles away. The day might be good for sowing or for harvesting. The machine must be kept going. I do not think these people are getting a fair "do" and unless somebody takes a firm stand on their behalf I fear the attitude will still be that they are unskilled workers. They are anything but unskilled workers. While this Bill is a step in the right direction, I do not think it goes nearly far enough.
