Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

I need a lot more than that to say what I have to say. It is pleasant to begin by welcoming the basic aspiration of this legislation, which is to ensure that the rights and entitlements of agency workers should be equivalent to those who are directly employed. That is a very laudable and long overdue measure. In that context, I am disappointed at the reservations or outright opposition of Deputy Calleary from Fianna Fáil, who spoke about the dangers such measures represent for competitiveness in the current economic environment. Frankly, I am amazed how economic buzzwords such as competitiveness and flexibility always seem to be more important for certain schools of thought than the rights of workers. It just defies comprehension.

While I want to make a number of specific points about this Bill and how well or otherwise it discharges its basic aspiration to give equal rights to agency workers, it is important to respond to Deputy Calleary on a general point. From the point of view of workers and trade unionists, the use of agency workers - not the agency workers themselves - has in many cases been a dagger pointed at the heart of workers' rights in this country and right across Europe. They have been used to undermine basic rights and conditions that workers have won and fought for over decades and, in my opinion, they have been used consciously by certain unscrupulous employers and some governments deliberately to weaken, divide and undermine the trade union movement and its role in trying to represent the best interests and rights of workers. Anything that moves to address that problem and ensure that agency workers are not used to undermine existing wages and conditions should be welcomed.

The idolisers of flexibility and competitiveness, such as Deputy Calleary, who seem to think that those things are so important, might just consider a few macroeconomic facts about our economy and the global economy in recent years. There has been a fetish for competitiveness and flexibility which has led to the undermining of workers' rights and the idea of a permanent, safe and secure job. The use of agency workers has played a very considerable part in trying to undermine that notion, as if there was something wrong with the idea we should have a permanent, safe and secure job. Is that not what we should strive for? Is that not what people like Connolly and Larkin fought for? Was the trade union movement not built in order to get away from a situation where workers were disposable objects, hired and fired at will by unscrupulous employers? Is that not what 1913 was all about? In recent years, some people want to go back to those dark days, and agency workers have been used to undermine the rights and entitlements that workers have won over the years. To my mind, that defies comprehension, but even in macroeconomic terms it has been a disaster. Economists and the political establishment need to understand that. The ratcheting down of wages, which happened systematically in this economy as a share of national wealth, has had disastrous economic consequences. It is worth spelling them out, because this is rarely commented upon in the big debates about the economy.

During the period of the boom in this country, the share of national wealth going to wages and salaries was reduced by 10%. That led to a direct correlated increase in the share going to profits, shares and bonuses. There was a reduction in the take of workers as part of the national cake, and an increase in profits going to the wealthy, shareholders, employers and so on. The result of this was that demand had to be sustained in the economy through the extension of credit by the banks. Banks extended credit to people whose wages were not high enough in order to fuel demand for property, retail and so on. The demand was being fuelled on the never-never and was part of creating the bubble that crashed the economy. The people who tried to push down wages and conditions and increase their profits helped create the conditions for the bubble which have backfired on them and led to the economic crash.

It is cutting off one's nose to spite one's face for short-term gain to think that by depressing workers wages and salaries one is somehow gaining.

On an international scale this fetish with competitiveness, flexibility and driving down wages and conditions has played a very substantial part in the financialisation of the global economy which played such a key part in causing the current economic crisis. Since the late 1970s in the hunt for profits, because profits were falling from the early 1970s onwards in the manufacturing industry and other areas, there has been a move towards pushing down wages and conditions, financialising the economy as companies try to keep up their profits, and pouring money into financial speculation and into all these obscure, weird, wonderful and ultimately very dangerous financial tools that were developed for making short-term profit. This is what companies did with their extra share of profits as they drove down the wages and conditions of workers. Simultaneously, they were depressing the buying power of ordinary workers to buy the goods and services that were being produced in the real economy.

People need to understand that the underlying reason for the systemic nature of the current global economic crisis is not only the individual greed of bankers and speculators but is precisely because of the fetish sustained over 20 or 30 years to drive down the share of wealth that goes to wages and salaries in favour of shares and bonuses which end up sloshing around in the financial markets destabilising the global economy, the European economy and the Irish economy. This is an important macro-economic point to make. Deputy Calleary is utterly wrong in his thinking, morally and economically.

The aspiration of the legislation is very good. Section 6 states that the basic working and employment conditions to which an agency worker is entitled shall be the same as the basic working and employment conditions to which a comparable employee is entitled. This is excellent and it will remove the danger that can be represented by the misuse and abuse of agency workers undermining existing wages and conditions and can mean a levelling up for the rights and entitlements of agency workers themselves. If Deputy Heydon is concerned about the excessive costs of the use of agency workers in the health service - and he is absolutely right - the way to deal with this is not by introducing this type of legislation but to directly employ them. If this Bill leads to a decision by the HSE and other bodies in the public sector to directly employ more people because it is better value for money, not to mention far better for the workers involved, it would be a very good thing indeed.

However, there is a very big problem with the legislation which comes in section 6(2) following the very laudable aspiration I outlined. It states:

This section shall not, in so far only as it relates to pay, apply to an agency worker employed by an employment agency under a permanent contract of employment, provided that, in respect of the period between assignments and subject to Part 3 of the Act of 2000 and any registered employment agreement or any order under the Industrial Relations Act 1946, he or she is paid by the employment agency an amount equal to not less than half of the pay to which he or she was entitled in respect of his or her most recent assignment.

This is the Swedish derogation and effectively undermines the entire point of the legislation. It means it is allowed to pay less to agency workers, such as nurses in the health service, if they are employed permanently in a health division of an agency. An agency can employ them and pay them less than a nurse would be paid by a hospital. In the periods when the nurse or other employee is not assigned to a particular company or a body such as a hospital, the agency is required to pay only 50% of what the employee receives when working in the company or hospital. What that person receives for working in a hospital can be less than an ordinary nurse receives for doing the same job. I use a nurse as an example but it could be any employee. In other words, agencies and employers can get around this by the agency permanently employing people and contracting them at a lower wages and conditions and paying them half this when they are not on assignment. I put it to the Minister that if he is serious about giving effect to the central aspiration and objective of the legislation, which is to give equal rights to agency workers and full-time employees, this subsection should be deleted because it is a major loophole and way out which will undermine and subvert the central aspiration of the legislation.

Section 7 allows for sectoral derogations. There are considerable conditions and qualifications for this, all of which are generally good. There cannot be a derogation from section 6 which contains the central objective of the legislation without there being collective agreements between representatives of the employees and employers and this must be registered with the Labour Court also. So far so good, but the question is raised as to how to define a representative of the workers. In this case, it is required that the union or representative body must represent 90% of the agency workforce. It is practically impossible given the nature of agency workers for a union to have 90% membership in the agency itself. It is entirely plausible that 90% of the workers of the company, body or organisation contracting the agency workers could be represented by a union but not the agency itself. Putting these types of restrictions on the ability of unions to represent workers in this sector and requiring high levels of representation in the agencies themselves is unrealisable practically for the unions and therefore leads to the possibility of abuse.

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