The Electrical Contractors Case: Irish Supreme Court Illuminates Collective Bargaining and Delegated Legislation
| Published date | 01 July 2022 |
| Author | Alan Eustace |
| Date | 01 July 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12699 |
bs_bs_banner
Modern Law Review
DOI:10.1111/1468-2230.12699
CASE
The Electrical Contractors Case: Irish Supreme Court
Illuminates Collective Bargaining and Delegated
Legislation
Alan Eustace∗
As Europe begins to emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic, two trends are clear: one, labour
market reform is urgently needed, to cope with new economic and technological realities; and
two, big government is back. The recent decision of the Irish Supreme Cour t in Náisiúnta
Leichtreach Contraitheoir Éireann vLabour Court illuminates the relationship between collective
bargaining and the regulatory state. In potentially one of the most important decisions in Irish
labour law in decades, the Cour t rejected a constitutional challenge to legislation aimed at
empowering social partners to regulate economic sectors through collective bargaining. This
article situates that decision within recent scholarship on the ‘labour constitution’ model of
labour law, under which the social partners should participate in economic governance.It also
highlights the relevance of the decision for the ‘Social Europe’agenda and the political economy
of both national constitutional law and the EU internal market.
INTRODUCTION
A decade ago, during the depths of the Great Recession and while Ireland
was subject to an IMF-EU bailout with savage austerity conditions attached,
the Irish superior courts struck down as unconstitutional swathes of the na-
tional industr ial relations system. In the aftermath, the government introduced
the Industrial Relations (Amendment) Act 2015, an attempt to restore some
of the previous system of collective bargaining and sectoral regulation, albeit
in signicantly weakened form. The 2015 Act was itself struck down as un-
constitutional by the High Court in July 2020, on foot of an application by
an organisation representing a minority of employers in the electrical contract-
ing industry: Náisiúnta Leichtreach Contraitheoir Éireann vLabour Court1(Electrical
∗Fellow by Special Election and Lecturer in Law,Magdalen College, University of Oxford; PhD can-
didate,School of Law,Trinity College Dublin.Thanks to my PhD supervisors, Mark Bell and Rachael
Walsh,and to Dáire McCor mack-George and Conor Casey, for their comments and suggestions. All
errors and omissions remain my own.
1 [2020] IEHC 303 (Electrical Contractors, principal judgment); [2020] IEHC 342 (Electrical Con-
tractors, decision on the nature of orders). This decision has been subjected criticism elsewhere:
see A. Eustace, ‘A Shock to the System: Sectoral Bargaining Under Threat in Ireland’(2021) 12
European Labour Law Journal 211.
© 2021 TheAuthors. The Modern Law Review published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Modern Law Review Limited.
(2022) 85(4) MLR 1029–1043
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License,which per mits use,distri-
bution and reproduction in anymedium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.
To continue reading
Request your trial