The workers at ICT Eurotel in Belmullet yesterday were meeting with their employers as they tried to thrash out a fair redundancy deal for themselves. The company, which does not recognise trade unions, refused the workers’ request for a union representative to help them work out the terms of their redundancy and asked instead for six workers to be sent forward to hammer out the deal.
The major sticking point for the workers on the redundancy issue is that ICT Eurotel is only offering the lowest possible redundancy package allowable within the law. The company is basing it on the reduced working hours which the employees have been working for more recently, rather than the full time hours which they were working previously.
The workers met with the four county councillors for the Belmullet area Gerry Coyle (Fine Gael ), Rose Conway-Walsh (Sinn Féin ), Michael Holmes (Indp ), and Micheál McNamara (Fianna Fáil ) on Tuesday at the council’s electoral area meeting and the councillors agreed to give whatever assistance they could.
Ian McAndrew, an elected member of Údarás na Gaeltachta, is also working with the workers to try to hammer out the best deal they can. McAndrew told the Mayo Advertiser: “The workers were having their first sit down meeting with the company on Thursday (yesterday ). The workers feel very aggrieved that the company are trying to base the redundancy deal on the hours they would have worked in the last period of time, when times went bad, which is somewhere in the region of 29 to 31 hours a week rather than the full working week of 38 hours which they were working the vast majority of the time here. There would be a big difference to the amount of redundancy that the workers would get if the company can base it on the shorter working week. The company is still profitable, it’s not that they are shutting down completely, they want the workers to still keep doing their job until they are able to hand over the work to whatever country they set up in again.”
Not letting the workers have representation in the negotiations is something that McAndrew is not very happy about. “It is not fair on the workers that they can have no representation at the meeting, they do not have the experience to negotiate a deal like this. When they asked me to get involved I had no problem. I brought the issue up with Údarás since they funded the company at the start up and they have made contact with the company, but as of yet they have not got a reply from them.”
