Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

----- and what is going on in so many other enterprises across the country. A worker who does not know at the beginning of the week how many hours he or she will be requested to work is not being afforded decent standards or dignity in the workplace. Some 6,000 people went on strike in full knowledge that they would face intimidatory reprisals from their employer. This demonstrates that there is an issue concerning standards and dignity in the workplace. It is not an appropriate response for the Minister and the Minister of State to put their heads in the sand and hope it will go away.

I encourage the Minister of State to bring forward the proposals on victimisation in the workplace. I suspect the Minister of State's proposals on collective bargaining are being frozen and challenged by some of his Fine Gael colleagues. Surely no one would object to legislation protecting the rights of workers to strike and to protect their livelihoods. If the collective bargaining legislation is going to be unduly delayed, the Minister of State should bring forward victimisation legislation separately. We could then, at least, proceed with that aspect and give security to workers who withdraw their labour. Workers have a basic right to do that and they should be able to do it without worrying about management's response when they return to the workplace.

As the Minister of State has stated, there has been a sea change in working practices across Europe and throughout the world. Some international organisations have used the downturn and the recession to drive forward a particular view of the world. Zero-hour contracts and a lack of respect for workers fits in with that view. Workers are viewed as expendable. The view is that they can be treated as equivalent to figures on a balance sheet. They cannot be and they never have been in this country. Long may that be the way. Long may we have respect for workers and long may this House, and whoever occupies this House, of whatever hue, defend the rights of Irish workers to go to work and to withdraw their labour if necessary. Long may we provide, invest in and support an architecture which allows for dispute resolution, so far as is possible, based on volunteerism and collectivism.

We cannot let Dunnes Stores get away with what is happening at the moment. Dunnes Stores is in the minority in terms of what is happening, but its size and its absolute intransigence in an Irish landscape is a worry. It believes it will get away with this. It believes that the story will move on, people will move onto the next headline and that people will come back and shop in its stores. That is its view and it is determined to dig in its heels and to see this out. It knows that, at the moment, nothing can be done to tackle this problem.

We cannot turn our back on decades of excellent volunteerist labour relations. We cannot turn our back for one company. If this one company continues to force the matter, other solutions will have to be found. We could spend another night debating the statistics to which the Minister and the Minister of State referred about low wages, the CSO and the 89,000, on the last count, who are on activation schemes and therefore not included in the live register. However, if we are to have a recovery that is built on quality jobs, respect for labour, and a country, as we come into 2016, in terms of our treatment of those who work and those who put their labour to use for the country, we need to live up to the ideas of that proclamation.

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