Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire (Cork South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Faraor, vótáil an Rialtas agus an Lucht Oibre i gcoinne na reachtaíochta sin ar bhonn teicniciúil. The Government and the Labour Party voted against that legislation on technical grounds. That is a pity because if the Bill had been allowed to progress to Committee Stage and perhaps strengthened and improved by amendment to the taste of the Government, the workers at Clerys and other workplaces where there were collective redundancies and informal insolvencies might have enjoyed greater protection. However, that did not happen. Workers upon being made redundant do not have adequate protections, and I urge the Minister and the Government to act on this. The German model of redundancy with payments approximate to pay and complemented by training is worth considering.

I wish to address briefly the issue of bogus self-employment, which has been for a long time a significant issue in the building trades. However, it is creeping more and more into other forms of employment, including IT, and across many employment agencies. In January of this year the Irish Congress of Trade Unions calculated that this loss to the Exchequer is roughly €80 billion per year, or circa €680 billion since 2007. Bogus self-employment allows the company to make an illegitimate saving on tax and employer PRSI, which increases profit by roughly 11%. It has been suggested that bogus self-employment has been allowed to flourish because the system of electronic relevant contracts tax, eRCT, is a default set-up. In many ways it has consequently facilitated employers in declaring a worker as self-employed instead of the proper designation of "employee". The entitlements of the worker in general have become somewhat eroded over the past few years, but with bogus self-employments these rights are practically non-existent: no entitlement to holiday pay, sickness or maternity benefit or even pension contributions; no redundancy; no notice of termination; and no recourse when it comes to a case of unfair dismissal. These workers are entitled to the same rights as any other workers.

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