Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State and I understand it is his first time at this committee. He will be glad to know we are a nice committee and I am sure his officials will confirm that. I thank the Minister of State's officials for all their work on this.

The SEO is supported by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and the trade union movement more broadly. I support the SEO in as much as it has been decided by the workers themselves that this is what they want. I have some concerns and some of those do not relate to the SEO but to the mechanism of enforcement. The Workplace Relations Commission, WRC's, inspectors do not have a specific responsibility to enforce SEOs. We can cut and paste my biannual rant about the number of WRC inspectors into this and there are not enough of them but even if there were enough of them they do not have enough powers.

We have seen what can happen when workers' rights are disrespected and the Minister of State will know I raised the Iceland issue with an Taoiseach and he said the Minister of State would come back to me. I know the Minister of State will do so but I hope that will be sooner rather than later. However, there are other areas and bogus self-employment, for example, is a handy way to get around an SEO. It is tough to prove it but the WRC inspectors are not coming in to look for that. What concerns me is not the SEO but conditions that render the SEO inoperable or useless to workers. It is an important floor and that should be stated. To be fair to the Minister of State he stated in his submission that it represents the minimum and that it is not the maximum or a target. It is the minimum as exists.

There is an unfair advantage given to employers that do not pay the rate and we saw that in the case of the Murphy 4, which I raised this morning. They went out to get the recognised rate for the job and Unite the Union would contend that they were sacked from their work for trade union activity on the basis that they have found it nearly impossible to get work and also virtually impossible to get social welfare. As long as the capacity exists to go around these mechanisms, they are effective but their capacity to be effective is incredibly limited.

We need a thriving construction sector and we need men and women to be able to build houses. We know that according to the Housing for All progress report, action point 14.6 states that the Government has an ambition to deliver a number of international recruitment events for construction workers. People coming to work here may be ignorant of their rights and entitlements and in those cases an SEO is even more important. Particularly now that it is a stated aim of Government to recruit from abroad, an SEO for the construction sector is extremely important but it is useless without the capacity to be able to enforce it.

We know about Iceland, we know about the Murphy 4 and it is the same with Tesco; they are changing the rosters on their workers. There are mechanisms in place but there is a growing sense that employers can act with impunity now, which should not happen. When we have a lack of enforceability from an SEO, this reinforces the idea that employers can do what they like. I have written to the Project Point Technologies lad in Iceland and I have not even had the courtesy of a response. For me, that kind of atmosphere underlines the absolute need for an SEO, which I do not dispute.

There are few mechanisms to support it. When everyone agrees then the rate gets paid but only because everyone agrees. We have a situation whereby other regulated employment agreements are down in the courts being challenged. I understand the status challenge and that but that is being held up and the application of the correct rate of pay in the security sector is being held up by legal cases. All of these things mean we need sectoral employment orders and registered employment agreements as they are mainstays of trade union activity. Can the Minister of State talk to me about enforcement? Enforcement is where I see that we have a serious issue.