Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 1 December 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Sectoral Employment Order (Electrical Contracting Sector) 2021: Discussion

Ms Tara Coogan:

When I said, “bogus self-employment”, I simply used this colloquial term. Obviously, a bogus self-employed person is not self-employed. They are employed. That is the distinction. If a person is genuinely self-employed, then he or she is genuinely self-employed and sets his or her own market rate. That is one of the difficulties in this space. While some people will maintain that they are indeed self-employed, somebody else might say that they are in fact employed. This is why this requires some fair processes and why people need to look into it in more detail. It is hard to nominate somebody. However, a person who is self-employed is not covered by a sectoral employment order.