Working in the new Ireland

Sunday Business Post - Recruitment Pages - Nov 25 2007

Foreign workers are an essential part of the workforce in Ireland and are often vital to business success, writes Dermot Corrigan

Research published by Chambers Ireland has revealed that foreign workers now account for 17 per cent of the workforce in Ireland. John Forde, chair of Chambers Ireland’s human resource policy council, said that the number of overseas workers employed in Ireland had increased substantially in the last 12 months.

"We are well up on last year’s figure of 11 per cent," said Forde.

The findings showed that the number of foreigners working in the tourism sector jumped from 31 per cent last year to 36 per cent this year. In construction, the corresponding rise over the same period was from 11 per cent to 17 per cent.

The number of foreign nationals employed in the public sector has risen from 5 per cent to 15 per cent. In manufacturing, numbers have risen from 14 per cent to 24 per cent.

The research, published last month in Chambers Ireland's 2007 Labour Force Survey, and conducted by Amarach Consulting, found that foreign workers were not equally distributed across all sectors in Ireland. 36 per cent of employees in the hospitality sector are overseas workers, compared to 10 per cent in the finance sector.

Larger organisations are more likely to have foreign workers on their staff. Among businesses employing more than 50 staff, 24 per cent are foreign nationals. 57 per cent of organisations questioned in the survey employ at least one worker from Poland. 23 per cent have at least one staff member from Britain. 16 per cent employ Lithuanian staff.

Forde said migrant workers were filling new positions in the booming Irish economy, rather than taking jobs from Irish workers.

"We have had a full employment situation for a number of years," he said. "In the main, foreign workers are filling roles that cannot be filled from the Irish workforce.”

Forde said that while some firms employ agencies to find staff abroad, most do not need to.

"If I advertise on one of the Irish job websites it is triggered worldwide," he said. "If I advertise using the local print media, I will get a lot of applications from abroad. There is a network that is sending word home."

Specialist skills
Gina Quin, chief executive, Dublin Chamber of Commerce, said people coming to Ireland to work often have specialist skills that organisations need.

"Employers are looking for very specific skills within IT and software development,” said Quin. “There are also the native speakers of different languages, whether Czech or Cantonese, sought for the localisation of products, or in providing services and support to other countries by phone. Generally employers must go outside the country to find those people."

Quin called on the government to use the tax system to attract highly skilled workers into Ireland. She pointed to a Dutch programme that offers international employees, with skills in short supply in the local job market, a tax-free allowance equivalent to 30 per cent of salary.

"We believe there should be some sort of tax-break, maybe on a temporary arrangement, for somebody coming into the country,” she said.


Work permits
Workers from 25 of the 27 EU countries can work freely in Ireland. Workers from the other two, Romania and Bulgaria, which joined the EU last January, still require a work permit to take up employment in Ireland, as do citizens of all other countries.

Citizens from European Economic Area member states Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein, as well as Swiss nationals, do not require a work permit.

Changes to the work permit system, introduced by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment last February, were welcomed by Chambers Ireland.

"We argued that the work permit should be held by the employee, as opposed to the employer," said Forde. "We were also looking for a simplification in the whole process. These changes have made a difference."

The work permit system still contains some important restrictions, however. Permits are usually only available for occupations with an annual salary of €30,000 or more. An application must be accompanied by documentary evidence of a completed labour market needs test. Clerical staff, manual labourers, retail sales workers, crèche workers and many jobs in tourism are explicitly ineligible for work permits.

Quin said the current work permit system was not responsive enough to the needs of employers in Ireland.

"Despite putting additional resources in, we are still too slow to make decisions and process applications,” she said. “We should be speeding the process up and making it clearer for both employers and individuals."

"I would particularly hold up a flag for the SME company, where one person might be 25 per cent of the their workforce. If one member cannot be cleared quickly, that is a big skills loss.”

Discrimination
Employers sourcing labour from abroad should not take into account an applicant’s nationality when choosing new staff, said Deirdre Lynch of Matheson Ormsby Prentice’s employment group.

"The Employment Equality Acts 1998 and 2004 prohibit an employer from discriminating against prospective employees on the grounds of race, which is defined as nationality or ethnic or national origins,” said Lynch. “Candidates who believe they may have been discriminated against can bring a claim to the Equality Tribunal, where the maximum compensation is €12,697."

Lynch advised employers to take care throughout the recruitment process to avoid any kind of behaviour that might appear discriminatory.

"Employers should ensure no potentially discriminatory language is used in an advertisement," she said. "Details of nationality or race should not be requested on the application form. It is very important that personnel conducting the interview process are trained in regards to what questions they should and should not ask, and how questions should be phrased.”

"Experience is an objective requirement for a position, but if you are only asking questions about the Irish market of non-national employees, then potentially you might have a claim on your hands."

Lynch pointed to a recent case where the Equality Tribunal found that an employer had discriminated against an applicant by requesting two references, which the tribunal said made applying considerably more difficult for non-Irish candidates.

"According to the legislation, discrimination can be either direct or indirect," she said. "It is irrelevant whether the employer intends to discriminate."

Lynch advised employers to liaise with industry experts to ensure that all recruitment processes employed comply with 'best practice' standards.

"It is important that regular reviews are carried out, where you sit down and look at your application form, job description, marking schemes for the interview and equal opportunities policies,” she said.

Lynch said non-Irish workers, who are increasingly aware of their rights, were willing to take legal action against their employer.

"The Equality Tribunal, is its latest annual report, remarked on a dramatic increase in claims on race grounds,” she said.

Integrating staff
Dell was recognised at Chambers Ireland’s recent awards for Corporate and Social Responsibility for its commitment to promoting and celebrating diversity in the workplace.

"We have employees from 34 countries," said Ingrid Devin, diversity manager with Dell. “It is important that staff and employers understand each other's culture. It is not just the differences that can be seen, the colour of my skin, or the language that I speak, it is also invisible things like work-styles and learning-styles of people."

"We have social events for our staff's familes, because the family is also extremely important. We celebrate national days such as Bastille Day and Thanksgiving, and the canteen might serve different food. During the World Cup we had television screens showing different countries play. For some nationalities, religion is very important, so we have a prayer-room on site."

Devin said there was a business motive to these integration projects.

"A diverse workforce is not just a nice thing to have, it is essential to our business success," she said. "This is an Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) hub here in Dublin, and we have people from all over Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We need all the different languages and skills. We have to be diverse otherwise we will not know what our customers need, and we will not be able to give them the right services and products.”

Devin said that Ireland is now an attractive place for Dell to base its EMEA operations.

"There is such an international workforce in Ireland that it is great for us," she said. "A lot of different languages and skills we can recruit in Ireland, but sometimes we have to go outside."