Ms Patricia King:

Students feature. I sit on the Low Pay Commission and the issue of students and where they sit in the order of things comes up quite a lot, particularly when employers come in to make submissions to the commission. The holy all of it is why do we differentiate. If someone is coming to do a day's work, an hour's work or two hours' work and is going to do the work to the required standard, that person deserves to get paid a decent wage for doing it. If he or she is available to work two hours a day or 15 or 20 hours a week, the employer is obliged to pay a decent and fair rate for the labour, once he or she does the required work. I am not sure I understand the difference between the non-student and the student worker.

I have heard some arguments made, though I would regard them as weak, that these people are training. The training issue is dealt with in the minimum wage. There is provision for that. I hope the apprenticeship will be a growing feature of our economy, to boost training access for people and so on. All of that, and how people are treated in the training mode, is dealt with in law through the industrial training orders. If one is making oneself available and has a contract with an employer to do the job, it really makes no difference if one does not fit into either of those categories.

If one does not fit into either of those categories, the fact that one is making oneself available and has a contract with one's employer to do the job really does not make any difference. If one is doing the job and getting paid, one should get a decent rate for doing the job. That would be my argument. I argue that at the Low Pay Commission all the time. I do not think that being a student makes any difference to it.