Ms Patricia Callan:

We have legislation that tells us what the metrics are. They are the things I have talked about today, such as assessing whether inflation is a justification for the minimum wage, in addition to movements in the earnings of employees, the level of unemployment and the employment inflation rate. It is all clearly labelled. The benefit for me of setting up a low pay commission is that we have all shared data - the committee has heard much conflicting data - and it is necessary for someone to put all of that together and figure out what is correct and what is not. It concerns me that our data seems to be so divergent even though we are all quoting from the same sources. The commission must do a thorough piece of work. It would be easier for employers to sell this concept back to our members if they could clearly see the justification on that set of metrics.

The problem in the past was that the Labour Court literally picked a figure out of thin air - I was not at those meetings, as the court would not take contributions or have hearings - and then one would meet the Minister and he would say it was about making sure work is attractive compared to welfare. That is my only concern and that is what we were repeatedly told.

What was said about underemployment is interesting. I would love to have a more detailed piece of work done around that, because what I hear from companies is actually the opposite. It is the case that they have had people on three-day weeks and they would love them to come back and work five-day weeks but the welfare system makes it unattractive for them to so do. Again, we can get into the practices of bigger corporations and specific instances that we heard about earlier, but understanding how the social welfare system interlinks with the labour market is something that we need to do a lot more on, because we do not have evidence in that regard. We have attempted to look at it through various groups in Departments, but no one has tackled it holistically.

The Government should fundamentally reform the entire social welfare system to make it easy to move in and out of work and to take account of hours worked and not have people penalised for coming to work when there are additional hours. The situation is not clear cut. It is also a concern for us because we have skilled employees at work and it makes far more sense in smaller companies, which is all I can speak for, to try to bring them up to full hours. The last time the minimum wage went up by €1 an hour, in many sectors that had minimum wage workers, they chose to reduce their hours from 20 hours to 15 hours. It was that black and white. It was a set number that made the difference in terms of maintaining welfare rates.

Again, I am not generalising about this; I know there are all sorts of other considerations, but it merits a much bigger discussion. We no longer work in a market where there is a five-day week composed of 39 hours, where one has a lunch break and goes home on Friday evening. The market is 24 hours a day and it is global and flexible. Workers can live with that too because a lot of workers have flexible needs and it might suit them to come to work for X number of hours because they have other commitments. Once we get our heads around that, we need to almost recreate our system from the ground up, and that would merit a serious amount of attention in terms of resolving all of these issues. We may be coming at the problem from a different angle but there is certainly a problem that needs to be addressed.