GOVERNMENT FAILING TO MEET COMMITMENTS TO FORMER CLERYS WORKERS
Over a year since the Company Law Review Group was asked to provide a report on preventing another Clerys type insolvency, Labour spokesperson on Workers Rights, Senator Ged Nash, said today that the Government is failing to meet commitments it gave to former Clerys workers.
Senator Nash said:
“Thirteen months ago, the Company Law Review Group was tasked with providing a report to government on ways in which company law could be improved to better protect workers caught up in a Clerys type insolvency.
“I am disturbed to have established that this report – commissioned in January 2016 – has yet to find its way on to the desk of the Minister for Jobs.
“Equally, the Duffy-Cahill report which I published almost one year ago and which proposed major changes to employment law has been gathering dust on the Minister’s desk.
“This significant review of employment law around insolvencies recommends a number of important legislative changes.
“It proposes an entitlement for workers to a 30 day consultation process where collective redundancies are being contemplated (whether the company is insolvent or not), and an automatic entitlement to two years pay where an employer fails to engage under the consultation clause.
“The nation was scandalised by the way in which the law of the land allowed workers at Clerys to be treated.
“It is accepted that the legal protections for workers and other creditors are inadequate and need to be beefed up.
“Yet, the current government continues to snub the commitments the State made to those workers.
“We do not know the minute or the hour when another Clerys-type scandal might befall workers.
“The Clerys staff knew that their jobs were gone yet they have selflessly campaigned to change the law so no other Irish worker will have to experience what they have had to withstand.
“The foot dragging from Fine Gael is quite deliberate and utterly shameless. Going out of their way not to discommode big business, the inaction and sheer lack of interest from the Minister is bordering on the immoral.
“The law needs to be changed now.”
Ends