There has been a upturn in the number of member companies seeking advice on the introduction of short time working and temporary lay-offs since US President Donald Trump’s announcement of tariffs on goods being imported from the EU last week, according to the Irish Business and Employers confederation (Ibec).
The organisation’s executive director of employer relations Maeve McElwee said on Thursday it was hearing of a small number of companies that have already moved to cut costs as the uncertainty over the scale of disruption to trade the tariffs will cause continues while others are seeking guidance as they plan for worst-case scenarios.
“There is a little bit of movement at the moment, some of it is not necessarily directly related to the tariffs, but yes, we have seen a big uplift in terms of queries around short time and laying off people,” she said.
“We would assume at this point really just planning and preparing for what the impact might be.”
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She said there would be a reluctance on the part of companies to act in a way that would involve losing staff for the long term when recruitment and retention has been such a challenge in recent years.
She repeated the organisation’s suggestion that some targeted Government supports in particular sectors would be helpful.
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“We’re not looking for supports that would be widespread as they were during the pandemic,” she said. “These would be very focused on industries that might be significantly impacted by the tariffs and trade disruption. They would be intended to help keep people close to their employer.
“The delegates here today are coming from companies who have spent considerable amounts of time and investment in terms of recruiting, retaining and up-skilling people within their businesses. That’s been their top priority because we’ve such a tight labour market and to lose those skill sets where people drift away in times of layoff or even with short time, would be critically damaging to some businesses.”
Speaking at Ibec’s annual employment law conference at the Royal Dublin Convention Centre she said the far larger immediate consequence of President’s Trump’s actions has been a pause to business decision making as employers wait to see how the trade landscape might change over the coming months.
The 90-day suspension of the more extreme tariffs imposed Mr Trump was welcome, she said, “but it still means tariffs of 10 per cent as compared to the low single digit tariffs that there generally there previously and we still don’t know what is going to happen in the longer term. It’s another 90 days of uncertainty”.
“There are sectors where you won’t necessarily see that that impact hitting immediately, it doesn’t mean that you’re looking at staff involved in production being laid off but we are seeing people looking at slowing or pausing of investment in a new piece of tech, a project or a research piece is coming down the line.”
