Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 July 2015

Select Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

National Minimum Wage (Low Pay Commission) Bill 2015: Committee Stage

2:00 pm

Photo of Dessie EllisDessie Ellis (Dublin North West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 11:

In page 5, between lines 25 and 26, to insert the following:
"(5) The Commission shall act as a watchdog of the incidence of low pay by examining the prevalence of pay two thirds or below of median earnings in the current period in each sector of the economy, and report its recommendations to reduce the share of employees in each sector who earn below two-thirds of the hourly median wage over the following 3 year period.

(6) The Commission shall examine and report on key patterns in paid and unpaid open market internships providing a regulatory framework for internships and to support professional associations to promote ethical internship programmes.

(7) The Commission shall examine and report on the effectiveness of existing policies to enforce the National Minimum Wage and make recommendations for improvement of compliance and enforcement.".

When the national minimum wage was first established, it would have been two thirds of the median wage had it been set into the future. This has not happened. In Britain there is a growing demand for its low pay commission to take on a watchdog role. This view was echoed by the Migrants Rights Centre in its submission to the Joint Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. It called for the remit of the commission to be expanded to become a watchdog on low pay and that powers be granted to set targets to reduce low pay across a number of policy areas. IMPACT recently commissioned a report entitled JobBridge - time to start again?, which asks for the JobBridge scheme to be scrapped and for the Low Pay Commission to examine the prevalence of open market unpaid internships. The report, the research for which was spearheaded by Dr. Mary Murphy, Maynooth University, recommends that the commission report on key patterns in paid and unpaid open market internships in Ireland, provide an overall framework to regulate all internships and support professional associations to promote ethical internship programmes. Sinn Féin supports this recommendation.

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