Dr. Peter Rigney:

I will try to deal with a number of the themes. The first point to make is this is deep-seated and its causes go back over the lifetimes of a number of Governments. From the point of view of the Oireachtas, it is probably best dealt with by a committee with a tradition of cross-party working, rather in the Chamber where there is a more adversarial tradition. One question one must ask oneself is why did we go through the boom years with such a high proportion of people not working? If one reads a National Economic and Social Council, NESC, report, what jumps out and hits one is that when the boom hit, a high number of people were depending on social welfare. One almost must go through this deliberatively, in a no-blame way to ask how did we get to that point. That leads me to the question as to what interventions work or what interventions should be in place.

The interventions that work are the ones that have been evaluated and that we can prove work. As the original agenda was to evaluate them, an EU evaluation unit, the ESF evaluation unit, was set up. Then we grew up and got plenty of money and told those in Brussels to go and take a running jump. We disbanded the evaluation culture, never mind disbanding the unit. The people involved in it were sorted out elsewhere. While we stood down the culture, there is a need to examine and evaluate programmes.

Programmes are seldom evaluated against each other, particularly if they are initiated by opposite Departments, as it were. I will give an example. The back to education allowance scheme is funded by the Department of Social Protection, while the back to education initiative is funded by the Department of Education and Skills. They are roughly the same size and provide the same benefits for the same number of people, but nobody will evaluate one against the other. Under the JobBridge scheme a common or garden employee is taken on with the same rights as everyone else and the person concerned is given a cheque in the post for X number of weeks. From a trade union point of view, it has the benefit of the State expressing an opinion on what is a decent threshold of work - it is 30 hours. Many people are being offered a lot less than 30 hours of work and many have no certainty in their working hours. Traditionally, if a person was offered a part-time job, he or she was told he or she would work, say, seven hours a week. He or she could then approach another employer and seek a further seven hours of work. However, the problem now is that an employee can be told an employer can offer him or her a few hours each week but that the employer wants him or her to be available outside these hours. That means the person concerned has no market power to seek employment from another employer. This is related to the issue of job quality.

Normally when unions raise issues such as this, somebody will say we will kill the small and medium enterprise, SME sector, but, by an large, this is not an SME sector problem but one related to large companies. A question was asked in the House two summers ago as to who were the major employers employing persons in receipt of family income supplement or jobseeker's assistance. It was a roll call of the large service sectors. There is no point in increasing the minimum wage if at the same time we increase uncertainty with regard to the number of hours people work.

If we consider this issue from the point of view of the social insurance system, it works on the basis of pricing risk. The person who smokes 40 cigarettes a day is charged more by VHI, Laya or another provider than somebody who has never smoked. From the point of view of risky behaviour in terms of hours worked, the employer's contribution is the same; therefore, the system does not price risk. That is what I would say about quality of work. Although the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation has not stated all that much, it has expressed an opinion by indicating 30 hours is a decent level when it comes to having a full-time job.