Ms Maeve McElwee:

I had occasion to engage with the UL authors as they carried out their research for this particular report. They interviewed me and a colleague in IBEC about some of the issues that came up. I had a number of concerns and questions for them about the interview on the basis that the questioning took on a remit well beyond the remit that the report had, which was contracts of less than eight hours. There was concern around the fact that all types of variable-hours contracts, including the full-time shift patterns of people on very significant rates of pay, were all being collated into the one report, which again was way beyond the scope of the report's remit. All of the information that was being transmitted was anecdotal. As the issue had arisen, we did not have any facts around how many people were on zero-hours contracts or very low-hours contracts. That is what UL was tasked with determining.

In actual fact, by coming to ourselves, ICTU and the various unions, we did not have that information or we would have already supplied it. Therefore, it was very much a conversation around what we thought, what our opinion was on how many variable-hours contracts there are or why there are variable-hours contracts. There was a lot of discourse around what the difference is between as and needs, if and when, casual contracts and variable-hours contracts. They are all very different and discrete types of working, but were all conflated into one in the report. My understanding, when I asked the question, was that UL did not carry out any direct survey to determine who was on variable hours, what the terms of those variable-hours contracts were and how many people wanted more hours, would accept more hours or were dissatisfied with the distribution or assignment of hours. That information is still not available to us.