Séamus Healy (Tipperary South, Workers and Unemployed Action Group)

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate. Agency work is a form of casualisation of employment and it has been used traditionally as a method to undermine wages and conditions of employment for full-time and permanent employees. My preference would be for agency work to be outlawed and normal employment practices and procedures to be used. However, we have what we have and, in the circumstances, we have to ensure proper protection of workers. In that respect I welcome the Bill as a small step in the right direction. It will require significant amendment during the legislative process, particularly on Committee Stage.

The Bill will affect between 30,000 and 40,000 agency workers. The health service, for example, employs more than 2,000 of these workers. While the legislation is welcome, it needs to be amended and strengthened and I look forward to Committee Stage when the United Left Alliance will table various amendments. I welcome the fact that the Government and the Minister abandoned previous attempts to secure a derogation from the directive. Comments by various employer organisations opposed to the legislation have been unhelpful. It is shameful that groups such as Chambers Ireland and IBEC believe that even the minimal protections provided for in the legislation should not be available to workers. The protection of employees is an important issue, which has been highlighted in recent high profile cases such as Vita Cortex and La Senza. While they did involve agency workers, they highlight that the protection of workers' rights and entitlements is paramount and must be pursued vigorously.

Agency workers are currently used to undermine the wages and conditions of full-time and permanent employees, particularly in the health service, and this raises the question of the need for the recruitment moratorium to be lifted urgently. The effect of the moratorium and significant reductions in budgets, including €750 million in the recent budget, means the service provided by the HSE has been significantly reduced and will result in the closure of hospital beds, 550 beds in public nursing homes, 500,000 home help hours and a decrease of 23,500 in the number of day cases. Agency workers are used by the HSE and, therefore, the moratorium should be lifted and full-time employees recruited to fill vacancies that have arisen. The cost of agency workers is greater than the cost of employing full-time workers and replacing workers in the normal fashion.

I welcome the protections in the legislation for core pay, workplace facilities, transport, crèches and so on but significant exemptions need to be addressed and amended in regard to sick pay, pensions, benefits in kind, bonuses and so on. The use of comparators in the legislation are vague and they differ from the concept in equality legislation. Why are the same methods not provided for in this Bill? Equality legislation provides for three definitions of comparators and to make a case, one requires a comparison under one definition but, under this legislation, one must make a comparison under all three definitions. Effectively, that would undermine the legislation. Of course, IBEC has highlighted this issue already and has indicated that this is an area which it will advise employers to use as a loophole in this legislation. This is an area which will need to be amended in the course of the legislative process.

Sick pay is an area that needs to be addressed. Whether a person is working a day, a week, two weeks or ten weeks, he or she can become ill. I believe these workers should have an entitlement to the normal sick pay.

Bonuses is another area that is exempt in this legislation. Bonuses have got a bad name in recent times. When one mentions bonuses, one thinks of the significant bonuses payable to senior civil servants, senior local authority officials and senior bankers, which have been a complete rip-off of the country over the past number of years. However, there are significant bonus schemes available as part of the employment pay and conditions of shop-floor workers and workers generally. There may be a Christmas bonus or there may be piece-work bonuses. This is an area in which this legislation is deficient. I believe that bonuses should come under the remit of the legislation.

Maternity leave is an area that needs to be looked at because many of the agency workers are women. It is not clear, at least to me, how the legislation affects maternity leave and top-up maternity pay. There is also the question of a derogation from the legislation in respect of workers who have a form of payment between employments. That would need to be addressed as well. Those are some of the areas that need to be seriously and significantly addressed by way of amendment in this legislative process.

The final area on which I want to touch is enforcement. This is an area that applies to this legislation, but it is a general point on all legislation. Enforcement is crucial to workers getting their entitlement under any legislation. There are a number of different agencies dealing in this area, inclduing the Labour Court, the Labour Relations Commission and the NERA. Unfortunately, the Labour Relations Commission and the Labour Court are inundated with problem cases and there are considerable delays in that regard. Justice delayed is justice denied. Additional resources must be made available to ensure the enforcement of this legislation.

The NERA's most recent report, published in the middle of last year, indicates that it carried out approximately 2,300 inspections in the year previously. That was a reduction on the number of inspections the previous year, when there were approximately 3,000 inspections.

It is notable that the NERA found breaches in many of the areas covered by this legislation. In agriculture, the compliance rate was 42%, in catering 26%, in retail 28% and in hotels 26%. The general compliance rate was barely over 50%. I understand that there has been an increase in the number of inspectors in this area but it is increase from approximately 30 to perhaps 45. That level of resource is not adequate to deal with not only this legislation but the general body of legislation affecting workers' rights and entitlements.

While I welcome the legislation and the confirmation and protection that it grants to agency workers on core pay and some workplace facilities, there are a number of other areas, particularly those that I have outlined, that require significant improvement and amendment during the course of the progress of this legislation through the House.

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