Some fool recently suggested that employers need new tools to control unruly workers. Really? I would suggest that employers and their political colleagues are really trying to socially engineer a system of industrial mastership  and servitude - masters and servants. Since the Employment Contracts Act was introduced in 1991, trade unionism in this country was compulsorily made voluntary. Unions have been emasculated - losing their influence and ability to further better the interests and rights  of their membership; real wages have been pushed down and the minimum wage has struggled to keep up as a consequence. 

 And despite health and safety laws, more employees have been injured and killed since  the ECA was introduced. Union delegates had a positive affect on industrial safety on most work sites.

Think back to Karl Marx's claim in the late 19th / early 20th century that capital and labour were the opposite sides of the industrial coin. Now labour is just lumped in with costs in a new industrial coin: "Capital and costs". There will never be any industrial democracy until compulsory unionism is restored!