Cuts need to start at the top

Dear sir - Minister Richard Bruton's plan to reform pay agreements for low paid workers, is in my opinion, an insult to the people who do these jobs. Perhaps he was lucky and was never in a situation where he had to take up any of these positions. Workers in cleaning, security, fast food and restaurants know only too well that there are contracts of employment. They also know that there are contractual agreements, where hundreds of thousands of euro are paid out to bankers, retired politicians and top civil servants, and we are told that their contractual agreements cannot be changed. However, these low paid workers are told that their contracts are not given the same status, although their agreements were negotiated by IBEC and the ICTU under the national wage agreement, Employment Regulation Orders (ERO) and Registered Employment Agreements (REA). Other proposals that he is threatening are to increase the basic working week from 39 hours to 48 hours; standardising conditions of employment; permitting derogations from REAs on economic grounds. Unfortunately the introduction of the minimum wage agreement (scrapped by the last government) has had no affect on recruitment by companies that had been paying under the rate compared with companies which had been paying more. When the Programme for Government was presented at a special delegate conference the Labour Party endorsed it on the understanding that everyone across the board would share the burden everybody pays according to their means, which includes professional people, farmers, judges and business people, and if we allow the cuts to start at the bottom then the programme for government is reneged on and becomes defunct. Yours, Cllr Tommy Grimes, Retired Members Section SIPTU, Fr McMullen Park, Kells, Co Meath.