Mr. Pablo Rojas Coppari:

The preliminary results from census 2016 show that the total number of non-Irish nationals was 11.6% of the population, while the percentage of people born outside Ireland had risen to 17.3%. The number of people with dual nationality is almost 105,000. Being a migrant has a pervasive impact on a person's labour market participation and follows him or her through his or her labour market trajectory. It does not stop when a person acquires long-term residency status or Irish citizenship.

The migrant worker epitomises the flexible and precarious work available in the contemporary labour market. That precariousness is constructed around several factors, the main one being the rights and entitlements afforded to a migrant worker based on his or her immigration status. Depending on the type of residency or visa given, a person will be allocated a certain number of hours he or she can work, going from part-time to full-time work. It also determines the mobility a person has in the labour market, meaning that he or she might be attached to one specific employer or sector. Immigration status is coupled with a person's lack of labour market mobility. That mobility might be constructed by his or her immigration status but also by the lack of recognition of skills. Migrant workers are also over-represented in low-pay sectors of the economy, in which mobility is much harder, particularly vertical mobility. There is discriminatory practice on entry, recruitment and promotion. All of this paints a dark picture for migrant workers in the labour market, meaning that they often lack security in the number of hours allocated to them.

Security of hours would be guaranteed by the proposed Bill. Many migrant workers are in what are traditionally considered to be shift work sectors such as food and accommodation, cleaning and care work and many work through agencies. Notice of their rosters is only required 24 hours in advance. The Bill is proposing notice of one week, yet that would be limited in affording migrant workers security to plan their income and the structure of their working week. Issues relating to child care were mentioned. It goes beyond simply caring for children into family formation. What is more important and necessary for migrant families and households is that security of income also have an impact on whether a person is able to reunify with his or her family. A person's family might not be in the State and he or she might need certain hours and a guarantee of a certain income to be reunified with his or her family. Other than that, they share the same problems of having a secure income which will allow them to access a mortgage, own property and so forth. That lack of security means that their need for housing, for example, is more precarious than that of the indigenous population.

The Bill proposes that a display notice with a roster be put up. Obviously, that would be a positive development. How would this apply to agency or multi-sited workers who might not be working in the same place or given that the place to which they are contracted might not be the place where the employment takes place? There is little explanation of how this right would be enforced. As we have seen from our work, the main issue for migrant workers is not their lack of knowledge of their rights but the lack of a possibility for them to enforce their rights. This goes back to the points made about the repercussions of asserting one's rights.

Those repercussions can be very hard for people whose immigration status is dependent on their employment or their day-to-day earnings are dependent on having one employment.

On income adequacy, poverty rates among migrant households are much higher than the overall figures for the indigenous population. From data we collect in our drop-in centre, in a sample of 740 people surveyed last year, 52.8% were earning less than €910 a month, which is the at risk of poverty rate. The majority of our client base is living at risk of poverty. That poverty is constructed on the insecurity of their immigration status but also the insecurity of working in low-paid, hyper-flexible types of employment, including not knowing how many hours one is going to have. My colleague Ms Edel McGinley will talk more about compliance.