Mr. Neil McDonnell:

I will follow up on some of the questions the Deputy asked me. One of the stand-out lessons from Covid-19 goes back to the philosophy of sickness and unemployment benefits as a charge on the social welfare system. We saw that when the temporary wage supplement scheme was introduced at the start of the pandemic, the payment to workers making more than €76,000 per year through the system was €0. We should contrast that with countries in continental Europe. For instance, if someone loses one's job in Denmark, the payment can temporarily be up to 80% of one's salary. That tapers down to a national basic payment but the principle is that caps on salaries were removed a number of years ago. The benefits are capped, however, and that is fundamentally unfair. That is one of the lessons we learned.

I will give an example of the high wage costs for businesses. We represent many people in the personal grooming sector. The UK has brought in an element of statutory sick pay and in some hair salons in the UK that has meant that salon owners have moved away from employment and what they are doing now is renting the chair. The outcome of that, which I am sure ICTU would not like to see happening either, is that people who were previously employees are forced to become contractors, generating their own charges for their services and then renting the fixed assets from a salon owner. That is an example of what is happening on the ground and what those in the grooming industry brought to my attention when I shared this proposal.

In terms of waiting days, there is one element that plays against that. In the scheme of the management of a statutory sick pay scheme, currently one has a State payment made after day six. To understand the impact of waiting days and so forth, in the case of a person who is on a daily rate of pay of X per day, what percentage of X would be represented by sick pay and what percentage of that could be recovered from the State that is currently covered by the illness benefit scheme? Unless we can see meat on the bone in the proposals, it would be difficult for us to deal with issues such as that.

ICTU has actively advertised the benefit of the scheme in the Netherlands, which is up to two years. Employees who avail of that are put into quite an intrusive return to work and health recovery protocol, which some people might not like. Second, SMEs can avail of insurance. The State insures and underwrites the cost of that for them. It is not an inability to pay. It is more a question of how one does that. Does an employer tell the State that he cannot afford to give two weeks' sick pay to that person? Do we just simply adopt an insurance measure that would be far more practical and sensible?