Marcella Corcoran Kennedy (Laois-Offaly, Fine Gael)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this Bill, which is long overdue. As in much of our equality legislation, it is as a result of an EU directive. It has been well documented that agency workers are typically paid less than directly employed colleagues and possibly taken advantage of in other ways.

Protections already exist for agency workers in the areas of health and safety, payment of wages and unfair dismissals. However, that does not mean that they have a guaranteed right to equal treatment on a par with the directly employed workforce. We must provide for equal treatment of workers under the relevant EU directive.

Equal treatment of workers extends to the basic working and employment conditions, which are provided for workers here and which have been well covered already by previous speakers. These include basic pay, overtime premium, work time, rest periods, access to amenities etc. I will not repeat them all here.

I understand that agency workers are an important element of the economy giving employers flexibility when they need it. However, this should not override our responsibility to protect temporary agency workers from exploitation. Considering that the figure of temporary agency workers varies between 35,000 and 42,000 depending on to whom one listens and that there are 340 employment agencies in Ireland, there is clearly money to be made in this sector. It is the worker who is the link between the agency and the hirer. It is a symbiotic relationship. I believe the worker is not merely a cog in the wheel of the economy but the oil that makes the wheels of the economy turn.

I have received representations from persons doing agency work who felt that they were being treated unfairly by not receiving the same remuneration as the person sitting beside them while performing exactly the same job, simply because they were agency staff. This inequity can lead to discontent and contribute to poor outcomes in the workplace. The other extreme was the dispute at Irish Ferries in 2005, where the company threatened to replace directly employed seafarers with low paid non-Irish national agency workers who I understand were eastern Europeans and who were paid less than the Irish minimum wage.

I particularly welcome the whistle-blowing provisions in sections 20 to 22, inclusive. There is not a tradition of whistle-blowing in this country but it is welcome that workers will have recourse to dispute resolution mechanisms if an employer penalises them for highlighting wrongdoing in the workplace.

I have a concern around the occupational pensions issue and I would hope the Minister could reconsider this. This particularly affects women as many of the agency workers are women, many of whom return to the workplace following child-rearing years via agency work. They would have had no opportunity during child-rearing to pay into a pension and this would be an opportunity for them to do so. I hope the Minister will reconsider this. Many temporary agency workers would be glad to pay into an occupational pension fund.

There has been some negative comment from employers and their representative organisations on the Bill but I see no reason Ireland should be any different from the majority of other European countries in our response to the EU directive. Our responsibility to workers, be they Irish or not, should ensure that they are all treated equally.

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