Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)

I welcome the commitment from the Government parties not to prevent the passage of this Bill. Some 100,000 people in the State can be categorised as working poor. The 200,000 people who were formally protected by the JLC system are depending on us to resolve this issue. Thus far Fine Gael and the Labour Party have been in major disagreement on this. While the Minister has the excellent skill of couching his views in reasonable tones, there is no doubt that his party has a design to liberalise the employment market. That will have the effect of reducing wages.

In regard to premium rates, Sunday rates and so on, the bottom line is that the changes we have seen amount to reductions in wages and will affect thousands of low-paid workers. Heretofore we have had bucket loads of sympathy and promises of legislation but no positive action that has made a screed of difference to the lives of hundreds of thousands of families. The political inertia from the Government will neither clothe nor feed a single child.

On the issue of job losses, Deputies Damien English and Jerry Buttimer inferred that JLCs have caused or at least contributed to the current recession. People earning €288 per week did not cause the recession. The JLC system has remained constant in recent years. What has changed is the austerity drive initiated by the previous Government and extended by the current Administration which is reducing demand in the economy and consequently pushing thousands of people into the dole queues. It is closing hundreds of shops and hotels on an annual basis and reducing the ability of individual employers to retain their staff. A person earning €288 per week is not a threat to the economy of the State but the austerity measures implemented by the Government certainly are.

There is no doubt that reducing the earnings of JLC workers will further reduce activity in the economy. People on JLC wages generally spend all of their wages because they do not have the resources to save. Individuals on the upper end of the earnings scale, by contrast, do not spend all of their earnings but instead put some of them into saving and investment schemes or take them out of the economy completely. Lower wage rates may allow some employers to take on more staff, but those lower wages mean there will be less money in the economy and therefore a lowering in demand. There is no doubt that small business owners will welcome any means of reducing costs.

Businesses on the verge of closing will grab onto that as though it were a life raft, because they will try anything to stay afloat. If one listens to business people, one will hear that the costs they are trying to deal with in the State include upward-only rent reviews, the taxation system and a non-progressive rates system. They include energy costs, which will be one of the biggest deciding factors in whether businesses can stay afloat over the next 12 months to three years. Yet we are focusing our energies on reducing the wages of those individuals who can least afford it. If we lowered the wage to €3 per hour, there is no doubt that businesses would be able to employ more people, but in a civilised society we need a floor below which wages will not fall, to afford people the opportunity to live a decent life and provide for their families. An honest day's work should get an honest wage.

Some of the views coming from the Government benches over the last number of months are ideologically rather than empirically based. When asking the Minister previously about his intention to lower the wages of some JLC workers, I asked him what evidence he had to prove that this would actually increase the number of jobs, and how many new jobs would be created, and he replied - I paraphrase him - that he had no hard evidence that extra jobs would be created, but he believed they would be. I also asked the Minister how many workers the new Fine Gael and Labour Party policy would push into poverty. I told him that according to Social Justice Ireland there are more than 100,000 working poor in the State and, in view of the fact that the JLCs focus mostly on those people, who are earning an average of €18,000 - that is, half the average industrial wage - the policy was likely to push more people into poverty. When I asked the Minister how many people were likely to be pushed into poverty, he said he did not know. There is no evidence-based, empirically researched policy, but an ideology which is pushing individuals into poverty.

The purpose of this Bill is to wake the Government out of its inaction and to create a political momentum that will solve the problems of hundreds of thousands of families. The Minister said it was an imperfect Bill, and we agree. We are making no bones about it. It is not water-tight at the moment. We need to deal with excessive delegation of powers and set out principles in legislation to guide JLCs. We need to consider the issue of criminal sanction and the inability-to-pay clause, which has also been mentioned today. However, there is nothing in what the Minister said that cannot be solved by amendments on Committee Stage. If the political will is there, we can resolve this problem.

It is next to impossible for Ministers and Deputies opposite truly to understand the lives of lower paid workers. I remember, when I was younger, a Progressive Democrats Deputy, Geraldine Kennedy, took a week out surviving on social welfare to try to understand the experience. A week is nothing. These people on the average industrial wage and the average JLC rate are earning unbelievably low wages and are barely surviving. It is impossible - I am not just saying this for political reasons - for those earning €90,000 per year or €180,000 per year truly to understand how difficult it is for these people to survive.

I welcome the Government's decision not to block this Bill. We need to develop a water-tight solution, but how do we do that? It is political will. As has been mentioned, Fianna Fáil produced a Bill similar to this, but it did not have the political will to implement it. Now, months after the High Court decision, it is Sinn Féin that has created the political will and momentum to ensure this issue is discussed and resolved. I appeal to the Fine Gael and Labour Party Deputies not to oppose, neuter or bury this Bill on Committee Stage. I ask them to join with us in making the necessary changes to solve this problem for hundreds of thousands of Irish families.

See this speech in context