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GAZETTE
NOVEMBER 1994
The chapter on the Employment
Appeals Tribunal is useful and
practical, dealing as it does with the
manner in which claims should be
made with excellent guidance on the
completion of forms and the
mechanics of Tribunal procedures.
Working Within the Law
is a
commendably practical and concise
book that will provide many lawyers
with a useful starting point from
which to address problems
confronting them.
Gary Byrne
•
Employment law textbooks, like
studio recordings of rare orchestral
repertoire, emerge, if at all, in spate.
This book is a worthy addition:
though-provoking, informative and
analytical. The authors split their text
into two sections, reflecting the
division of labour between them -
collective employment law and
individual employment law.
An introductory chapter probes the
socio-political derivations and
underlying focuses of employment
law and points up the difficulties
disclosed by a self-contained system
of industrial relations tribunals which
yet provides for appeal to the ordinary
courts. In the authors' view this
judicial penumbra straitjackets the
development of the law into a context
of conventional grievance redress
focused on the individual.
The tortuous law governing trade
unions is presented in a cohesive and
systematic fashion. Such controversial
chestnuts as trade union recognition
and rights of association are well
covered, and there is a useful
discussion of the issue, and its
implications, of whether strike action
suspends or breaches the employment
contract. The several torts under
which liability for industrial action
can arise, together with the regime of
immunity culminating the Industrial
Relations Act, 1990, are capably
analysed. The authors do not spare
criticism of
lacunae
in the statute and
demonstrate how a judicial tendency
to follow persuasive British
precedents in the emergence of new
torts, unmatched in each case by
statutory curtailments corresponding
to those enacted in Britain, can have
disquieting implications for trade
disputes immunity in Ireland.
The individual employment contract is
scrutinised against the increasingly
versatile marketplace in which the law
operates. Analysis of the traditional
distinction between 'contract of
service' and 'contract for services'
draws in a review of the alternative
work force (part-time workers and
independent contractors), showing
how the protective legislation only
partially brings in these categories
from the cold.
Detailed consideration is given to
equal pay, employment equality and
statutory unfair dismissal, though the
coverage is selective in parts, with
perhaps less attention than
practitioners might like to time limits,
especially under the equality
legislation. The book concludes with a
chapter on health and safety
concentrating on the Safety, Health
and Welfare At Work Act, 1989 with
a note also of relevant European
Directives. The terse treatment in a
rather short chapter on "Statutorily
Implied Terms" of statutory minimum
notice, holidays, maternity leave and
redundancy might not appeal to all.
Occasionally, the authors indulge a
tendency towards the subjective in
their elaboration, with court decisions
often described as 'positive' or
'optimistic' according as they shore
up the immunities of the trade union
movement, for example, or enhance
the status of women in the workplace.
This is quite understandable; but,
given that emotion is the antithesis of
logic, such coloured epithets need to
be sifted carefully when assimilating
the authors' otherwise commendable
presentation of the law. Frequently,
the recording of the names of judges
could have benefited from more
vigilant editing. At one point (page
120) the same judge in the same case
is alternatively styled as "Ms Justice
Carroll", "Carroll J ." and "Justice
Carroll". Elsewhere the redoubtable
Lord Denning appears just as
"Denning".
This is a stimulating textbook of
wide ambit in a technical and
developing area of law. It will appeal
particularly to the thinking
practitioner and to students equally
concerned with the social implications
of the law, its derivations and ultimate
direction, as much as with the actual
law itself.
Readers should be aware of the
enactment since publication of this
book of the Unfair Dismissals
(Amendment) Act, 1993 and the
Terms of Employment (Information)
Act, 1994. This is no criticism of the
two authors whose fine work can
stand proudly despite these
subsequent legislative accretions.
Albert Power
•
Ireland and the Law of the
Sea
by Clive R Symmons, Dublin 1994,
Round Hall Press, 240pp, £39.50,
ISBN 1 85800-022-X.
Clive Symmons
has written an
important, innovative and interesting
book on Ireland and the law of
the sea.
This book is important because it
brings together in one place Ireland's
diplomatic and legal practice in
regard to its internal waters, territorial
seas, contiguous zone, the fishery
zones, the Exclusive Economic Zone,
the continental shelf, the high seas,
the deep sea bed as well as the
issue of maritime delimitation
generally.
The work is innovative because this is
the first time that there has been such
a comprehensive survey of Irish legal
and diplomatic practice.
This is an interesting work because
the author has peppered his work with
Labour Law In Ireland
by Caroline Fennell and Irene
Lynch, Dublin, Gill & Macmillan,
1993, 295pp, softback, £24.99.
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