Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

I support Deputy Tóibín's amendment. We need a watchdog in respect of employment, low pay and exploitation. We have some watchdogs, for example, the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, but they are underfunded.

I wish to speak in support of subsection (6) of Deputy Tóibín's amendment on the role of internships and the need for more research into same. Having done an amount of work in this regard, particularly through the campaigning website, ScamBridge.ie, it is my strong belief that internships, facilitated by the State via JobBridge, First Steps and Gateway in terms of councils, Tús and so on, are consciously used by many employers to take advantage of free labour. This is widespread and has an impact across employment, in that employers can effectively tell or imply to employees that, if they seek wage increases or so on, the employer can bring in someone for free to do that work and therefore question why they would grant any wage increase. Rather than dealing with the issue of unemployment, internships can make it worse, because they depress wages generally in the economy and normalise the idea of people working for free. This is not just an Irish phenomenon, but an international one. We should stand against it. Researching the key patterns in paid and unpaid open market internships would assist us in knowing what is happening and outlawing those internship programmes that are exploitative, which ours are.

Turning to amendments Nos. 20 and 21 from the Anti-Austerity Alliance, we must be sensitive and responsive to changes in the cost of living, particularly as regards the low paid. The commission making recommendations every three years is not adequate. A better approach would be yearly. It would be even more preferable were minimum wage rates indexed to inflation so that, if there was inflation, low paid and minimum wage workers would not automatically lose out.

Regarding amendment No. 21 specifically, three months is too long a lapse between recommendations emanating from the commission and their being acted upon by the Minister in the context of cost-of-living increases and higher inflation rates. Such a time lapse would be used by employer organisations to apply pressure on the media and build opposition to increases in the minimum wage. It should be shortened to one month.

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