Mr. Pablo Rojas Coppari:

We have frequently talked about flexibility here. We cannot discuss flexibility outside of the context of low pay, which is the reality for the majority of people who are working in the sector that we are discussing. On people being allowed to accept or refuse hours or changes in schedule, many people we work with simply cannot refuse a shift, even if such a person has given a phone call in the morning and has plans with his or her family. The reason is that many of these families are single-income families. The people with an income are generally on the minimum wage or just around it. Being able to plan their expenditure requires that they maximise the amount of hours they work. One needs to work 25 hours on the minimum wage to not be at risk of poverty in Ireland. We are talking about many ten-hour or 20-hour contracts here. These types of job do not guarantee that a single person will not experience poverty.

Among migrants, what we often see is one-earner families, because of our immigration regimes and so on. People are not given the opportunity to refuse hours at any stage. I do not think compliance is as simple as having good and bad employers. I think employers can be good to certain employees and bad to others. The reason they are good to certain employees, as Deputy Neville discussed, is because someone else is probably taking the stick. This is generally what we experience much of. Particularly in my research in the care industry, we see that those who are not afforded flexibility or who are given poor treatment are generally migrant workers, at the expense of other workers. It is not necessarily linked to nationality, but it is about how close a person is to the management and so on, and nationality often plays a role in that.