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IRELAND IS AWASH with redundancies currently, particularly in the tech sector, and the government this week announced some reforms to redundancy law.
The new laws will cover some of the most egregious redundancies – where employment is terminated with no notice, consultation or redundancy pay by companies that are insolvent, having hived off valuable assets into other group companies via corporate restructurings.
The infamous closures of Clerys and Debenhams department stores highlighted serious loopholes in our corporate restructuring and employment protection laws and a report was published in 2016 by the former chair of the Labour Court, Kevin Duffy, and Senior Counsel, Nessa Cahill, recommending major reforms to these areas of law. The Duffy Cahill report has gathered dust on various Ministers’ desks for years, so it is good news that at least one part of that report is finally being acted on.
But these reforms will not affect the vast majority of employees being made redundant from very profitable companies today, particularly those in the tech sector.
As an employment solicitor, I spend much of my time advising employees who believe they have been unfairly selected for redundancy and who want to know their rights.
Of course, it is perfectly lawful for companies to restructure and reduce their workforce, as long as they do so in a transparent and reasonable manner and comply with our laws on collective redundancies and unfair dismissals. Employers must be able to demonstrate both that they have a genuine business need to eliminate a particular role, and that they have fairly selected the particular individual for redundancy. They must consult with any potentially affected employees with the aim of avoiding the redundancy or finding a suitable alternative role.
The need to explain the rationale behind their decisions seems to be a problem for some employers. It appears that some tech companies have been cutting staff numbers recently not because they actually need to, but rather because “the market” and their shareholders expect them to because everyone else is doing it.
Results released last week by Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon sparked a stock market rally as the tech sector giants posted stronger Q1 earnings than many analysts had been expecting. Yet many companies continue to go through further rounds of redundancies along with hiring freezes.
That being the case, the justifications for many redundancies in my opinion are getting thinner and thinner. In my experience, companies are dismissing very talented, high-performing staff who have significantly contributed to their profits over lengthy periods of time.
Alternative open roles in these companies are few and far between, and the companies are not engaging with employees who suggest alternatives to their redundancy, or who point to flaws in the business case for their redundancy.
In extreme cases, some companies that anticipate they will make redundancies this year have even reportedly started making life difficult for employees in the hope they will leave “voluntarily” without the need for the company to make a redundancy payment. Suffice it to say, that could amount to a constructive dismissal and anyone in that situation should take advice!
As well as this, many employees I’m advising feel particularly aggrieved because their treatment while being made redundant is in such stark contrast to their employer’s stated policies and values, holding themselves out as being great places to work. These workers are now experiencing the sharp end of corporate hypocrisy; the difference between what a company does for good PR and how it acts when it comes to their bottom line. See also: Greenwashing.
Many companies offer more than basic statutory redundancy pay, but in return for an “enhanced” redundancy package employees are required to sign away all rights they have to sue the company for how they have been treated, the most common potential remedy being an unfair dismissal claim.
Employers are betting that most employees will accept their enhanced payments and therefore any problems in their redundancy process will be moot.
But with floods of employees entering the jobs market from these companies, workers are now worried that the severance they are being offered won’t see them through until they find a new job.
However, they are also hesitant to challenge their redundancies via unfair dismissal complaints at the Workplace Relations Commission because of the long delays getting these cases heard, and the consequent delay in receiving any compensation should they win.
Most simply can’t afford to wait for 10-12 months for their case to be heard, so they feel they have no choice but to accept low severance offers from their employers because they will receive this payment far sooner than any potential WRC compensation. This is simply not good enough.
Our employment dispute mechanisms were streamlined in 2015 when the WRC was created and this was done to ensure better, fairer and more efficient industrial relations mechanisms in this State. However, due to the dearth of Adjudication Officers, ordinary workers are still not receiving swift justice.
Workers must not be put off from making a claim in good faith because the Government is failing to prioritise the industrial relations machinery of the State. More Adjudication Officers are needed to ensure swift access to justice. As the old saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied.
Ciarán Ahern is Partner at McInnes Dunne Murphy LLP law firm. He is also the Labour Party representative for Dublin South West.
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Shhh! It’s bad enough half the world hates us with the crisis, could you not have kept this a secret for a few years? *plays victim*
No one hates you!!!! You are loved !!
That’s history for you. What country hasn’t been the instigator. Our slate is far less dirty in comparison to the likes of Britain, Germany, the US and basically most of Europe. What matter is now not then and dealing with the likes of North Korea and Israel.
Israel actually had its fair share of Jewish slave ships and traders.
But like Irish slave traders, its rarely talked about.
Israel was only founded in 1948 so I don’t see how it was involved in the slave trade.
@waffler i meant israelies/jews. I was replying to the above post.
Not singling them out just pointing out that like most of us who dont know about the Irish slave traders, dont know about other countries who partook. we only see and hear of Europeans etc.
so, does this mean that Irish now accept
their own sh1t smells as well?
Many of us Irish always thought ours didn’t. Past & present.
Not being able to tell the difference between very difficult economic circumstances & the rape, horror & sheer dehumanisation of slavery … #firstworldproblem
It’s still happening today all over the world. This may be a historical thread but if you open your eyes and ears you’ll discover it’s just more underhand now!!!
Absolutely. And not so secretly/ underhand. http://www.thejournal.ie/readme/column-why-isnt-modern-day-slavery-criminalised-in-ireland-350965-Feb2012/
Hold on a minute we were victims of a slave trade from the 8 th till 11 th centuries. The Vikings invaded us and sold us ( well some of us ) as slaves in Constantinople.
there may have been a few idiot Irish out there that were involved in the slave trade. But let us not forget the amount of Irish sent to Australia for petty crimes such as stealing an apple to survive hunger. Or the Irish sent to the west indies to work the plantations with the African slaves. Or what about the Irish that were forced to build roads in the southern US states because they were considered less valuable then black slaves.
Yeah Aaron, lets not forget all the Irish slave ‘owning’ plantation owners and masters who were very prevalent in the same southern states that you claim the Irish were forced to build roads in, (a new one on me I have to admit) the reason why so many people from the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean have Irish surnames is because they were owned by Irish slave traders and plantation owners. Even Ireland’s patron saint came to be as a result of Irish pirates and slave traders. Also many of the Irish sent to Australia were not slaves, they were criminals and in many cases rebels, also don’t forget the British sent many hundreds of thousands of English, Welsh and Scottish people down under as well for just as paltry a crime as the ones you mention. Too many Irish people like to think we’re all saints and scholars, like to cover their eyes and ears and pretend the Irish have never wronged anyone which as history shows is NOT the case by a long shot, the Irish were there up to their necks in every dirty little colonial war or dubious trade that took place, they were slave traders, empire builders, mercenaries and many of them made fortunes and done very well for themselves out of all these enterprises so leave off with the ‘victim/persecuted” chip mentality. Also you can’t judge history by today’s standards like somebody else on here noted Irish slavers were just part a business network that nobody would have batted an eyelid at back in the day. George Washington was a slave owner as were many of the ‘founding fathers’ of the USA, many an Irishman fought for the confederacy in the American civil war because they wanted to maintain the slave economy.
ed is close to being right the poor from ireland and anywhere else where used by the elite for there gain the history o humanity is one of exploitation with the masses being bent to the will of the few
As someone once said, life is always a blend of the good the bad and the ugly, which includes the Irish obviously. The “saints and scholars” image is also grounded in fact, Ireland of the early middle ages and the scriptorium of the monks. Slavery could not stand up to the Judaeo-Christian dispensation, however, and it was consigned to the dustbin theologically by Irishmen who had also plied the slave trade a century earlier.
Only in the past few centuries has the slave trade become abhorrent. For tens of thousands of years slavery was just part of normal society. At the time those Irish were involved in the slave trade nobody would have batted an eyelid at the thought that they made a fortune from trading in slaves. Most western Europe was built on slaves in the sugar,rubber, coffee and Tea plantations etc. America only got rid of their slaves 150 years ago.
Now before you all get excited and start condemning me I am not condoning Those Irish that were involved but I can understand that at the time it was acceptable.
Good points, Mick Jordan. We can’t view past societies by today’s standards. What was acceptable & standard practice then was then.
How come then did the Belfast traders mentioned in the piece saw it as reprehensible?
Mass slavery has been practiced at least since the discovery of copper and mining thousands of years ago. Also… When the Vikings captured Irish men, they would generally castrate them before selling them on. Though it’s not perfect, the world today is nowhere near as bad as it was. We should be grateful we are alive today, in this country, in this generation.
Jayus Declan, I’ve a sudden urge to cross my legs after reading your comment.
the King of Dahomey (I think it was) was one of the richest men in the world through selling his own subjects to the slavers, and most slavers capturing and transporting negroes to the coast for sale were also african, albeit Arabs from the north. But why am I not remotely surprised that Paddy was involved in brutal exploitation…?
Mick your statement is an exercise in moral relativism and makes no historical sense. As long as slavery has existed there has been opposition, especially from those that were to be enslaved. It was never acceptable. You’re almost dehumanising our ancestors. Torture was also common place in our history – do you think no one batted an eyelid at that? These people who engaged in the slave trade are as guilty as the SS. Have a look at the Manicheans , they called for slaves to free themselves sin the 4th century, or hoe about St. Patrick’s condemnation of Christians being enslaved. Or go even further and read about the “first abolitionist”, Gregory of Nyssa who condemned the institution of slavery over 1,500 years ago.
This is no surprise. The elite don’t care who they exploit. It’s still happening now fgs.
The Walsh family of Kilkenny were married into the Hogans.
We are living on the backs of the third world, our lives are subsidised and when it all falls apart and it will! they will be the survivors. They have retained the skills to live without. Us? We are victims of our own success. Doomed I tell you, doomed!
Bring on the thumbs down!!
We will still be doomed!
Definitely on my reading list. There has always been a streak of brutality and inhumanity in the Irish.
Some things never change , glad to see That slavery is still alive and kicking today in modern Ireland.
Maybe we could resurrect this industry, could bring in some badly needed tax revenue and on the other hand remove the dead wood from our shores….
Scary that people are agreeing with you
But what kind of a price would we get for a FG/Lab or FF politician … as they are the only deadwood I can see!!
Reading the book right now its great the Luke Ryan chapter is brilliant would make a great film
The past is the past… Move on and learn from it …
Oh. And the beloved Bears won in the last 4 seconds .. Da Bearz..
must have been deleted from history the rise and fall of the Irish empire.
Lol wow that this suprises anyone if pathetically funny and somewhat sad. Of course we’ve had scounndrels, pirates, and general eejits lol look at our govt!!!! Uh I mean our history plus all the turncoats who sold out their own to the brits for power n favour. Lol yup id say thatd cause we’re human.
What we now know as Dublin Bay and the islands within it, was, before the Vikings, before Christianity, the very centre of the Western world slave trade, as well as having a very organised, social hierarchy with slaves at the bottom, naturally. Male slaves were called mugs, ironically. the islands were used to keep captured slaves, which were then traded. The Irish have always been slavers, and then along came the Anglo Normans…. Karma’s a bitch.
It sounds like a fascinating book. I was only recently reading about the Wild Geese (granted, it was the Wikipedia entry!) and what happened to them next, nowhere did I come across their involvement in the slave trade. I knew Nantes was built off the back of the slave trade spoils, and it is indeed a magnificent city architecturally, but I didn’t know that the Irish or their descendants had such a key role in this business. Indeed a lot is made of Irish people who went abroad and achieved success, and rightly so – perhaps it is only natural that we don’t hear about the shadier characters. Indeed, only last month I saw the monument to the Wild Geese overlooking the River Shannon in Limerick – it would be interesting to go back there and check if any of the family names inscribed on that are the same families mentioned in the piece above.
I think there is a key contrast though between the Irish who were sent as indentured labour across the Atlantic after the Cromwellian defeats and the Irish who sold others into slavery: those Irish who were sent to work in the Caribbean were sent as part of the official ruling policy at the time, while those Irish who profited from the sordid business were unscrupulous individuals happy to make their fortune off the back of others’ suffering. As the blurb about Joe O’Shea’s book says, the focus is on Irish “characters” who did wrong – so it’s about the misdeeds of individuals, rather than those of the country as a whole. Doesn’t by any means exonerate those involved in the slave trade of course.
“Walsh senior, together with his son Antoine, commanded the ship that carried the defeated King James II from Kinsale in Co Cork to France after the Battle of the Boyne”
“Philip had settled in St Malo in Brittany (where Anthony or Antoine was born on 22 January 1703)”
The battle of the boyne was fought in 1690, but you say that Antoine commanded the ship that carried King James II after the defeat at Boyne.
But then in the next paragraph you say that Antoine was actually born in 1703.
It’s basic errors like this that would make me look at the rest of your article very sceptically.
It seem that in America the slave owners had to pay the for the Cost of keeping them after they were too old and feeble to work anymore.
Now there’s an answer worth pondering by the social service ‘
For older people nearing retirement. The state could simply sell them off.
W
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