SIPTU Liberty Newspaper June 2014

News
Liberty
JUNE 2014
5
As bakery sit-in ends, it’s time to
close gap for locked-out workers...
By
Mick
Halpenny
IT WAS a great day for
the Paris Bakery employees
on Tuesday,
10th June when the Revenue
Commissioners announced
they were putting
the company into liquidation.
That meant their 19-day sit-in
was ended and the 25 workers involved
could now apply for their
unpaid wages, holiday pay and
other entitlements from the
State’s Insolvency Payments
Scheme administered by the Department
of Social Protection.
The workers had been engaged
in a sit-in at their place of work on
Dublin’s Moore Street ever since
their employers closed doors without
warning in late May, leaving
workers owed roughly €125,000 in
unpaid wages and other benefits
and entitlements.
Worse still, the locked-out workers
had no means of getting the
money from either Paris Bakery or
the State because their employers
had not gone through any formal
insolvency procedure, such as
bankruptcy, receivership or liquidation.
They began a campaign of occupation
and publicity to highlight
their plight.
Supported by the Migrant Rights
Centre Ireland (MRCI), trade
unions, including SIPTU activists,
and Irish Congress of Trade Union
President, John Douglas, they took
their case to the public, on to the
airways and to the Dáil.
Their campaign struck a chord of
From left to right: Corneliu Rotaru, Inna Kovalska,
Johanexis Joa, Paloma Vaz Marcal, Mael Daumas,
Anissa Hosany, Matilde Naranjo and Eduard
Claihnet Photo: Photocall Ireland
sympathy as well as anger with the
public at the unfairness of the current
law on employee protection
in the event of insolvency – an
issue Congress on which has been
campaigning for a number of years.
Congress Legal Officer, Esther
Lynch, points out the law here is
not only unfair, it’s also out of step
with European legislation.
And Congress is not the only organisation
that has a major problem
with the current set-up.
Last year in the High Court, Justice
Mary Laffoy also flagged up
the “unfairness inherent“ in the
law over how it deals with employees
of companies that have ceased
trading but have not been formally
wound up as opposed to those in
firms subject to a formal wind-up
procedure.
So Congress is proposing to pull
Irish law into line with provisions
under the European Directive on
Insolvency, so that when an employer
has ceased trading and payments
to employees have stopped
permanently for a period of six
weeks or more, then the company
should be “deemed” insolvent.
That means the workers concerned
would be able to apply for
payment of outstanding monies
from the Department of Social Protection.
That’s the case that was argued
by a joint delegation of Congress,
MRCI, and Paris Bakery workers,
who addressed the Labour Parliamentary
Party group, chaired by
Louth Labour TD Ged Nash in the
Dáil on Wednesday, 11th June.
As Eduard Claihnet, one of the
spokespersons for this remarkable
group of workers, said: “We are
very happy for ourselves but now
we want the Government to
change the law to make sure no
other workers have to go through
what we had to!”
But perhaps the last word should
go to another of the workers’
spokespersons, Inna Kovalska,
who told the Labour group: “The
other lesson from our campaign is
that workers should join unions to
be stronger so that maybe we can
deal with these kinds of situations
before they get bad.
“The Government can help by
making it easier for workers’
unions to be recognised.”