Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

Many recent reports in the media have highlighted grievous exploitation of immigrant workers. In the construction industry SIPTU officials have found such exploitation. Recently the bricklayers union, BATU, was so concerned that it met the Polish and Lithuanian ambassadors to highlight a gross abuse of their nationals. I wish to raise, in particular, one major scandal of immigrant worker exploitation of massive proportions. There is a major foreign-based multinational construction company employing approximately 10,000 people, 2,000 approximately in this State, which has secured massive local authority and State contracts here. This company imports workers from its home base, who do not speak English, controls their passports and work permits, accommodates them often in company barracks, demands an extent of hours worked that can only be called grotesque and, incredibly, pays unskilled construction workers between €2 and €3 per hour basic pay and skilled workers somewhere over €3 an hour. In short, this is a modern version of bonded labour. The instigator is Turkish-based Gama Construction Ireland Limited.

The national minimum wage is €7 an hour. The registered employment agreement for the lowest paid operative in construction is €12.96 an hour. This case is a national scandal financed by extensive public funding. I call on the Taoiseach to ask the Minister and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, as a matter of priority, to order an immediate investigation into Gama Construction and its pay and work practices. Will its records be demanded? Will the Taoiseach ensure that interviews are conducted with workers out of the way of company pressure? Will he ensure the Department sees that no worker is victimised as a result of this investigation and if Gama Construction should act to send workers home, a method used by these companies, those workers are sheltered and protected? I will ask SIPTU, to whom the company signed up some of its workers as a cover, to do so. Companies like Gama Construction not only exploit immigrant workers but undermine wages and conditions for all workers and, through crooked means, they underbid other companies who pay the full rate. This is a serious matter.

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