Ms Edel McGinley:

Research we carried out in 2015 on work and low pay highlighted that people knew their rights but they could not claim them. It goes back to the fear of repercussions on the worker asking for, say, holidays or break times, and the implications of that. This year's WRC report showed that there was an overall 38% rate of non-compliance in the labour market, namely exploitation. Industries with high levels of non-compliance are food and drinks at 48%, hotel and retail is 45%, domestic work is 23% - there is a caveat with that figure as there were only 11 inspections - agriculture is 47% and hotel is 35%. They found no exploitation in fisheries which is not our experience at all, it is absolutely widespread.

We believe banded-hour contracts really give protections to workers and particularly to workers in non-unionised sectors. It allows them to advocate for themselves, it gives power back to the worker and that is really important because there are many individual workplaces where there are low or no contracts in place. Among the people we work with, it is a common scenario for people to have no contracts at all.

We very much welcome the Bill. We welcome the six-month look-back period. We are particularly concerned about the Government announcement this week of a new 18-month look-back period and feel it is too far. It is very much open to abuse. We support the tight areas of banded hours, the five hours. We would say for the sake of clarity and to avoid confusion that we need to be sure where the band starts and ends. At the moment it is 15 to 20 hours and it really should be 16 to 20 and 21 to 25 hours. Those areas are also relevant.

We are concerned with enforcement. This is a huge problem in the State in terms of exploitation and enforcement. It does not matter if there is a notice on a wall if nobody is going to know about it and it is not something that anyone is going to overly complain about. How legislation is enforced is key as are the resources necessary to do that. The members have our submission on that.

Finally, we see a real need to strengthe anti-victimisation provisions in legislation because of what all the people here have said about people being victimised when they ask for their rights and try and assert them and that this is without having to go to the courts and the WRC to vindicate them. It is important that there are strong penalties in place when people breach legislation and that is not there at the moment.