Arthur Morgan (Louth, Sinn Fein)

Last week, I attended a public meeting on agency workers in Waterford. At that meeting SIPTU's general president, Jack O'Connor, described the defining characteristic of this issue as silence. He was correct; this issue has not received enough media attention and some workers are unaware of the threats looming over their current terms and conditions of employment. People need to be crystal clear about the inevitable consequence of failing to deal with this issue. The campaign by the trade union movement is putting it on the agenda. By tabling this joint Sinn Féin-Labour motion we hope to give further momentum to that campaign by ensuring this Government gets the message that workers simply will not stand by and allow their rights and standards of employment to be eroded.

It is important to understand how this situation came about. While employment agencies have a legitimate function in various sectors of the economy and can play an important role in meeting the short-term needs of certain employers, the phenomenon which has developed in recent years is entirely different. In a study of the problem published in 2002, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions identified temporary agency work as the most rapidly growing form of atypical employment in the 1990s, spurring most decent states with social consciences which had not already done so to introduce legislation to provide for the principle of equal treatment.

A loophole in our employment rights regime is being exploited with dire consequences for all workers. The figures are astonishing. We now have 520 agencies for a population of 4 million people. What started off as an innocuous form of temporary labour between permanent jobs or to cover maternity leave has mutated into something far more sinister. While temporary agency workers have some minimal legal protection, such as minimum wages, this is totally inadequate and far from a guaranteed right to equal treatment with the directly employed workforce, the pay and conditions of whom are generally significantly above the minimum. The deficiencies in legislation covering the employment of agency workers has been grasped by certain employers keen to avoid normal obligations to their workers. There have even been cases whereby companies have established agencies to employ all their staff. These employers have realised they can use agency workers as a source of cheap labour. In what other scenario could one employ two groups of workers side by side and pay one group less money than another while making them work longer hours, denying them holidays, sacking them when they are sick and denying them redundancy packages? This is what agency workers are subject to every day.

It is unacceptable that the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment has failed to publish data on the number of placements for temporary workers since 1999. Regardless of whether this is intentional, it is difficult to get a picture of exactly how many workers are being employed in this manner. It is also difficult to establish numbers because of the ambiguity surrounding whether the user company or the agency actually employs the worker. What cannot be denied is that the number of agency workers is growing and that their increased use is linked to the avoidance of ordinary employer obligations in regard to workers' rights and entitlements.

Every Member of the Dáil will be familiar with cases of exploitation of agency workers and undercutting and displacement of existing workers as a result of the employment of agency workers. While the Government fails to acknowledge the extent of the problems that have developed as a result of its inaction, I have no doubt that Government backbenchers will be able to outline many cases from constituencies across the State.

I would like to highlight a number of cases that have recently come to my attention. The use of agency workers to depress wages and conditions of employment has particularly taken hold in the construction sector. It is now the case that few workers can find employment in the construction sector without joining an agency. Developers and contractors have hit upon a loophole that allows them to ride roughshod over workers' rights and the Government is allowing them get away with it. Tonight we are joined in the Gallery by a number of men who were recently fired from a local authority-owned site in Kildare by a construction firm that has refused to employ PAYE workers since last year. The site is populated by agency workers and the men were fired for refusing to become self-employed C2 and C45 workers and for refusing to waive their trade union membership.

Last week, I met a Kilkenny man who works in the construction sector. He had many experiences of ill-treatment and discrimination, the most startling of which was that for years he was paid a construction sector grade D wage for a job which should have been paid at the higher grade A rate based on his skills. The differential of €2 an hour every hour of every day went to the agency which employed him. When a union eventually intervened and managed to ensure he received the appropriate wage, he did not receive a cent in back money from the agency that had literally been robbing him for the entire period.

The use of agency workers also has implications in terms of health and safety. The latter is one of the reasons agency work is prohibited in Spain as being dangerous. At a recent meeting in Waterford organised as part of the trade campaign for equal rights for agency workers, those present were shown video footage of Polish workers using a guillotine to cut marble. The workers in question were not using any protective gear because their employer refused to provide it. The men's hands were continually under the guillotine and a SIPTU official recalled how he met men who had lost fingers doing the job. Those men worked Saturdays and Sundays for a flat rate and were accommodated in cramped, dirty and unsafe conditions. They had no choice in where they lived. The message from their employer was clear — "If you leave my accommodation, you leave my employment."

Lest anyone think that the employment of agency workers is restricted to one industry, it should be known that agencies are being used in almost every sector. I know a young woman who, straight from college, went to an agency seeking clerical work. She was placed in a well-known IT firm as a receptionist. She discovered within a short period that her directly employed co-workers, some of whom had fewer responsibilities than she, received better pay, had better holiday entitlements and were treated to much better conditions overall. She had no contact with the agency except to receive her payslip each week. The woman was expected to carry out far more duties by the company where she was placed than the agency had employed her to do and when, after a number of years, she asked her workplace management why they would not make her permanent, she was informed that they did not want to employ her on foot of overhead or budgetary reasons. We all know the reasons the company would not employ her directly. The worst aspect of this case is that the woman did not even know she was being exploited. She had never even heard the term "agency worker" in the context we are using it in this debate.

The situation is similar for the many non-national workers who become trapped in agencies. They do not know their rights and are not familiar with the labour laws in this State. The Government is doing little or nothing to protect them.

Excuses made by Ministers in the past for the failure to legislate for equal rights of agency workers simply do not stand up. Claims have been made about a potential loss of competitiveness that would result from cracking down on the exploitative use of agency workers. No excuse can be made that would justify the exploitation of vulnerable workers. Every state in Europe which ranks ahead of us in terms of competitiveness has some form of protective legislation. It is also important to note that there has been no evidence of any negative effect on labour market flexibility in those states which have such legislation. A successful economy cannot be based on a race to the bottom in respect of workers' rights and wages because there will always be lower-wage developing economies which can undercut their more developed counterparts. While the Minister for Finance acknowledged this in the past, it is deeply disappointing that competitiveness is still being offered as a spurious excuse for the failure of the Government to protect decent working standards. The Government must accept that while there can be flexibility when it comes to drawing up an employee's contract, there cannot be flexibility as regards his or her fundamental rights and entitlements.

In respect of the call for the reduction in the waiting time before agency workers receive their entitlements, the trade union movement has made proposals which would see the period before such workers receive direct recognition reduced from six weeks to four. Sinn Féin strongly supports this call. My party would go so far as to say that we should debate whether there should be pay parity from the initial date of employment, with other entitlements coming into play after the four-week period.

There is always the fear that employers, particularly those in the construction sector where jobs can be short lived, can hire somebody for six weeks and then let them go. Such employers have found loopholes to allow exploitation before. They will seek them again. Sinn Féin firmly believes that a person doing the same work as somebody else should be entitled to the same payment from the outset. We do not have an apartheid system in this State, or at least we should not have one. We cannot, without deep shame, put two workers beside each other and treat them differently for the sake of saving a few bob.

What this motion seeks and what the trade union movement is demanding is the immediate introduction of legislation to provide that agency workers should be guaranteed equal pay and treatment and be protected from being less favourably treated than other workers in the user undertaking. Such legislation needs to specify a maximum period for which agency workers would be employed and also a maximum period beyond which such workers must become direct employees.

It is also important that the right of workers employed by agencies to trade union representation be protected. The status of the employer needs to be clearly established in law so that — unlike current ambiguous system — agencies' responsibilities are spelled out. In addition, the inclusion in such legislation of occupational restrictions similar to those introduced in other states, where the use of agency workers for certain occupations is excluded on health and safety grounds, should be considered.

If employers can continue to employ agency workers and treat them as they do at present, we will continue to see the erosion of workers' rights across the entire economy. Agency workers will be used to depress wages in every sector and to destabilise job security for every worker in the State. The exploitation spreads. It is spreading even as we debate this matter.

Sinn Féin is committed to fighting for legislation that delivers equal rights for agency workers. We will work with the trade unions, the Labour Party and others to ensure that the Government introduces legislation without further delay. We also want to see this issue addressed in the North. Sinn Féin tabled a motion at the Northern Ireland Assembly demanding equal treatment for agency workers. That motion received all-party support. Those of us concerned about the future of workers' rights must unite in this demand. All Members who want to see exploitation stamped out must support the motion.

This is a crucial issue for working people, particularly in the context of their terms and conditions. It is important to all workers, whether they be agency or permanent, immigrant or Irish. The cancer of exploitation to which I refer will drive the race to the bottom.

This morning, Louth County Council unanimously passed a motion, tabled by my colleague, Councillor Jim Loughran, which supports the thrust of the motion before the House. I hope all local authorities will do likewise. The trade union movement will continue to drive the campaign on this issue. That campaign will have the support of Sinn Féin and the Labour Party.

Legislation relating to the minimum wage is insufficient to resolve this matter. There are concerns that said minimum wage will form the basis of any new legislation which might be introduced. Craftsmen and craftswomen, tradesmen and tradeswomen are entitled to considerably more than the minimum wage. Long-term agreements have been established between the trade union movement and employers and these cannot be eroded. There can be no going back. This issue must be dealt with. Workers and their representatives will win this battle.

See this speech in context