Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 3 November 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Challenges to Ireland's Competitiveness: Discussion

Ms Linda Kane:

We had that as well in our bulletin that came out in May.

That presented more opportunity to go into depth. We called for the right to disconnect and we welcomed that because inadequate mental health protections for employees who are working in their homes, where the line between home life and work life gets blurred, can lead to long-term stress issues, poor productivity and poor performance, which, again, is bad for the business as well as being bad for the individual. Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, the NCPC sees remote working as an opportunity to benefit both the individual employee and the employer and broader society, so having those protections in place is very important. It is also a matter of having things like guidelines as to how you work and where you work, making sure that people are safe in their homes, that they have the right equipment and technology and a broadband connection to be able to do their work safely in their homes without back issues from a poor chair or poor lighting and so on. We think it is very important to have those protections in place for employees.