Dr. Laura Bambrick:

The last time the introduction of statutory sick pay was looked at was when the troika was in town. When it went through our books to look for potential cost savings - to put it diplomatically - it looked at how we provide workers with sick pay. The troika identified that we are really unusual throughout Europe in that our Social Insurance Fund picks up the cost of workers’ sick pay from day one – day one minus the waiting days. In other countries, the employer is entitled for a short period. If the illness lasts longer than that, the Social Insurance Fund then kicks in to cover it. The push-back was very similar to what we are hearing today, which is that now is not the time to introduce it and the country is going through so much that it is important to keep labour costs low. One of the recommendations of the troika was that statutory sick pay be introduced because the existing situation was placing a risk on the State because the Social Insurance Fund is not a fund. It is a cost that is taken out of the day-to-day outgoings of the State. That is the last time this was looked at. This time, we did not need the troika arriving in town. It was a global pandemic that brought us to this space.

Regarding the GP certificate, we must go back to the origins of this Bill. It concerned Covid clusters in meat factories. Employers in this sector are very wealthy with a mostly migrant workforce. How would that migrant workforce function under this Bill? The majority of them are on a minimum wage. The Bill will provide them with 70% of their daily rate. That is lower than the average cost of seeing a GP, which is €60. Seventy percent of an eight-hour day on the minimum wage is in or around €57 so already they are out of pocket by €3. They are also based in really rural communities. The chances of seeing a GP in a built-up environment such as Dublin are already difficult, so seeing a GP in a very isolated area would add further expense involving in travelling to see that GP as well as the practicalities of having GP certification on the first day. They would be the concerns of congress, which is why we recommend that a period be introduced where someone can be self-certified in order that people can have those one or two days and then on day three, have the time and knowledge to know if this is a sickness that will require a further period of recuperation.