The Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Richard Bruton has announced the results of new reforms of the State's five employment rights and industrial relations bodies.
There has been an elimination of the backlog for Rights Commissioner hearings, which was at 142 days in 2010.
The Minister was speaking as part of the IBEC Employment Law Conference.
Mr Bruton is in the process of reforming the State's employment rights and industrial relations structures and processes by establishing a two-tier Workplace Relations structure and putting in place more efficient and effective workplace dispute resolution mechanisms.
Prior to these reforms, there were five separate contact points previously in place, 30 forms had to be filled out to make a first instance complaints and it was taking up to eight month to acknowledge complaints.
Now, however, a new single workplace relations customer Service portal is in place, a single complaint form has replaced the 30 pages - although a fully online version of the complaint form is not yet available. This should be made available later this year - and complaints are acknowledged within 5 days.
There's also a new workplace relations interim website is now in place.
The next major step in this reform programme is to establish the two-tier workplace relations structure. This means that from the end of this year two statutorily independent bodies will replace the current five.
Work on drafting legislation to establish this new structure has commenced.
