Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 2 March 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

General Scheme of the Right to Request Remote Work Bill 2022: Discussion (Resumed)

Ms Patricia King:

They are challenges that occur and have occurred for the two years of the pandemic. We have had some feedback on the over-reliance on certain technologies, and some people have referred to the Big Brother aspect of this in respect of how employers have tracked employees and so on. What we are looking for is a reasonable solution. I take the point Ms McElwee makes about how, when we were operating in pandemic-type circumstances, we did not have a choice and that, therefore, the exigencies that arose had to be dealt with. Some of those experiences are valuable and will order how we manage those issues into the future.