Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 31 January 2017

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Banded Hours Contract Bill 2016 [Private Members]: Discussion

4:00 pm

Mr. Ian Talbot:

I will be quick anyway. We have had some substantial responses on this already. Ultimately, there is a nirvana aspect to this. Would it not be great to have a booming economy and for people to have choices of jobs? That would immediately mean that people would have a choice between this type of job, that type of job, these type of hours or that type of contract. That would be fantastic, but I guess we are not there yet. I keep coming back to the vulnerability. We spoke earlier about the vulnerability of small businesses and how they are least able to deal with new regulations and obligations. Larger companies' pay are not in this general space at all anyway. However, they have the resources and the skilled HR departments and everything else. Small businesses are desperately trying to stay alive, manage their cash flows and make some sales. Adding in new restrictions, regulations, things that have to be posted and converted into Polish and everything else is, for 39 out of 40 jobs, going to end up causing extreme grief and threaten viable businesses, all in order to solve what I think is a relatively small problem.

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