Dr. Desmond Ryan:

It certainly would require either amendments to or direct incorporation with various pieces of legislation. One difficulty with which we are all very familiar as employment lawyers or practitioners is the piecemeal legislative situation in regard to a myriad number of Acts of the Oireachtas dealing with specific issues. That is realistic in terms of the need to address specific issues as they arise, but that is where we are on the legislative picture. In my written submission, in regard to the consolidation of these protections, it seems potentially anomalous and undesirable that, for example, the existing provisions in the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997, in sections 17 and 18, would coexist alongside the provision in section 5 of this Bill in terms of the obligation to provide the information about availability. That seems likely to give rise to very significant duplication of resources but also confusion as to the notification obligations.

I also mentioned the concern about unfair dismissal. As the committee will be aware, and I know it has been rehearsed in other submissions, there is a 12-month service requirement qualifying period. A major concern I have in the current Bill - I return to the text of the Long Title and the aim of this legislation which is to protect employees, to protect workers - is that if I speak up and look for my employer to give me an additional band of hours, under the current wording I have no recourse if I am summarily dismissed for having done that. Even if the employer accedes to my request and gives me the additional hours, I still have no recourse for unfair dismissal unless I have the 12 month qualifying period. To return to the Chairman's comment, I believe that consideration is necessary as to how these measures would tie in with the existing legislation on unfair dismissal and with the time period, and also to look at it from the perspective of the employer insofar as the employer is already dealing with its obligations under the Protection of Employees (Fixed Term Work) Act. Take an employee on a fixed-term contract of six-months duration, how is that situation going to be reconciled with the provision in section 3 in regard to a six-month window? What mismatch would there be, if any, between the entitlements that the worker could have under this legislation in the context of the fixed-term work legislation? A related point is the need to have consistency of definitions. As the committee will be aware, the definition of "worker" is that borrowed from the Industrial Relations Act.

A point I would make more generally, coming from that point, is that this Bill seeks in a very commendable way to protect workers, but it seems to me to be trying to unify two very different approaches, one from an industrial relations perspective, which is evident in the borrowing of the definition of "worker" from the 1990 Act on the one hand, and on the other, the protective legislation in the employment law sphere. I already mentioned the part-time, fixed-term and agency work Acts. Those pieces of protective legislation give a framework within which this type of protection for the precarious worker could be achieved on a footing that would potentially be more balanced.