Mr. David Gibney:

I will reiterate a little of what Mr. Forbes has said. It would be good to put on the record where the balance lies as well. If an employer pays at a high rate he will not be able to employ as many people. However, if everyone keeps cutting wages there is less money for people to spend in the local shops and the economy. In the past 18 months Mandate has negotiated wage increases for approximately 70% of our members and this has put approximately €10 million in the back pockets of low-paid workers, who spend all their money in the local economy. It is important to put that on the record as well.

On the zero hours issue I was pleased to hear Deputy Tóibín point out that these are real people. Sometimes we produce reports and discuss statistics and numbers and we forget that these are real low-paid workers in difficult situations. In the past six months or so I have met with many non-union workers and talked to them. They are not necessarily getting zero hour contracts but they are getting low hour contracts. I offer one example. The individual is on a ten-hour contract but he had been working for between 40 and 50 hours for the past two years. Then, in February he made a health and safety complaint about a fire door being locked. Subsequently, he was brought down to his contractual ten hours contract. He was obviously intimidated and now he is behaving very reasonably for the employer but he will not put his head above the parapet. Earlier, Mr. Light referred to the breaches of legislation and that out of all the inspections which took place, some 55% of retailers have been in breach of some form of legislation. This individual and his situation does not fall into that bracket because no breach of law occurred but he has been intimidated into not complaining about his rights of employment. We do not have a collective agreement with this particular employment but, to echo the comments of Mr. Light, that is why collective bargaining rights are altogether necessary in today's economic climate, especially with levels of precarious employment on the increase.

I have a little experience of working with the trade union movement in Australia, where they have proper collective bargaining rights. They also have right of entry rights. This means that within 24 hours I can walk into any employment anywhere in that country and inspect for health and safety breaches or other employment breaches. If that type of legislation was brought into Ireland it would sort out a good deal of this trouble. If we are really going to make an impact on the suggestions or make an impact to try to improve the lives of the real people who are at the bottom of these cases then the suggestions in the document are excellent but putting in place effective collective bargaining rights should be a priority as well.