Mr. Seán Murphy:

I thank the Chairman. I note the previous observations of my colleagues to my right and I do not propose to repeat exactly what they said. We also do not support zero-hours contracts in the retail sector. It is about retail excellence which is about supporting, training and upskilling staff.

Our big issues with this and the outgoing legislation in terms of the minimum wage relate to the knock-on relativity impacts. It is not so much the recipients of the minimum wage. It can be a challenge living in Dublin inside the M50 on these wages. However, it is the knock-on impacts on staff whose salaries are built on the minimum wage.

We note there are still JLCs and other employment agreements that have a further levelling or increasing impact on cost. Our concern would be that while we hear rhetoric of it being evidence based, how will it be established? How will our competitiveness be measured? How will the legislation adjust and derive itself from that?

To echo what my colleague from ISME has said, in terms of take-home pay, we have one of the highest VAT rates in the world at 23%. TASC has referred to this as being an incredibly regressive tax. We have highly progressive income taxes but a highly regressive value added tax, eating into the take-home pay of those on low wages.

We are in an era of almost negative inflation. The most recent retail numbers at the end of January noted that by value retail sales are up by less than 1% - by volume they are up by a lot. That is on account of very significant discounting undertaken by private sector operators. Rather than the legislation dealing with the cost of low pay etc., it would be much more important if it took into account cost-of-living issues and the drivers of those cost-of-living issues. The legislation seems to be missing out on the Government's impact on that space.

We are obviously coming through a long global crisis that has had a major effect on this economy. When one looks on the increase in VAT, the lack of movement on upwards-only rent reviews, the changes to sick leave legislation and how they impacted on employee expectation in that area and moves to effectively abolish the employers' rebate for redundancy, the business case for employers to create employment is increasingly challenged. It is in this context that the observations that we already submitted in writing to the committee come to mind.

We worry about how the evidence-based legislation will be delivered and we note that we already have a very high minimum wage in this country. In the context of this legislation, our biggest concerns are with the knock-on impacts and the data used to derive the determination of valuation.