Ms Patricia King:

As I made reference to earlier, I believe that prohibition of zero-hour contracts needs to happen immediately. That is not provided for in this Bill. The issue of notifying employees of the number of hours in any week that they are required to work should be in law. As was set out in the University of Limerick, UL, review, the matter of people being paid for a minimum number of hours at their rate of pay should be set down in legislation. Again, it would stop much of the unbalanced relationship whereby the employer is entitled to call people to work and then send them home having earned nothing. In a lot of cases, it would have cost an employee to go to work, then when he or she gets there, there is no work and the employee is sent home. If the person does not take up the work, he or she is no longer on the list to be called for work. Again, this is more of the unbalanced relationship.

We believe that there should be legislation as the UL review has set out. That issue is very prevalent, for instance, in education. Somebody can be called in to do an hour's work then the classes are changed, and he or she is not needed to do the lecture and is told to go home. Certain parts of the education sector have very bad practice in this regard. We have debated and discussed this many times. From our perspective, we would like to see legislation which, at the very least, attempted to address zero-hours contracts, the minimum number of hours and the requirement for an employer to be able to set out what hours an employee will be requested to work per week or per day, whichever is appropriate. This should be set out at a very early stage, probably on day one. We believer an amendment to the Terms of Employment (Information) Act or a new composite Bill would be the most appropriate instrument to achieve this. Those pieces are fundamental in trying to address this imbalance in the relationship between worker and employer. We would like to see legislation that started to deal with those issues at the very least.