Ireland
Key Facts
| Population | 4,468,000 |
|---|---|
| Collective Bargaining Coverage | 44% |
| Proportion of Employees in Unions | 34% |
| Principal Level of Collective Bargaining |
Company (after breakdown of national pact) |
| Workplace Representation |
union |
| Board-level Representation |
yes: state-owned companies |
| Company Board Structure |
monistic |
Trade Union
Just over a third – 34% – of employees in Ireland are union members – a figure that is slightly higher than the recent past because of a sharp fall in overall employment as a result of Ireland’s severe economic crisis. There is only one union confederation, the ICTU, but individual unions, in particular the largest, SIPTU, have considerable power and influence.
more ...Collective Bargaining
A series of National Partnership Agreements provided a non-binding framework for pay bargaining from 1987 to 2009. However, the most recent agreement, signed in 2008, was unable to withstand Ireland’s economic crisis, and the country has returned to company level bargaining in the private sector, while in the public sector the government has imposed pay cuts.
more ...Workplace Representation
There is no statutory system for permanent employee representation in Ireland. Those who work in unionised workplaces – about half the total – have representation though the union. New procedures have been introduced as a result of the EU directive on information and consultation, but they may not make much difference.
more ...Board-level Representation
Employee representatives in Ireland’s single-tier boards are only found in the state-owned sector, where they normally account for a third of the total. Privatisation has cut the number of companies covered and the process is continuing.
more ...European-level Representation
With no universal statutory structure of employee representation, Irish members on European bodies are normally elected by the workforce as a whole in a special ballot. However, the situation is different for some of the structures of the European Company.
more ...Health and Safety
No threshold is set for exercise of the right to appointment employee safety reps. There will, as a rule, be one representative for each establishment, but the details of the appointment procedure are not specified.
more ...Financial Participation
The measures taken by the Irish government in the 1990’s to develop and improve the statutory and fiscal regulations governing employee financial participation initially led to an increase in the number of voluntary profit-sharing and share ownership schemes, though the number later dropped. The current incidence of profit sharing schemes in private-sector companies with 10 or more employees is currently 11% (according to the “European Company Survey”, a survey of more than 27,000 HR managers in Europe conducted in 2009).1 The same survey shows that employee share ownership schemes exist in ca. 6% of Irish companies.2
more ...