Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Does the Labour Party think that when Jim Larkin arrived in Dublin he turned around and said, "Do you know what, lads, I'll come back in a few years because the economic climate isn't quite right at the moment."? Of course he did not. He fought for workers because workers' rights were not granted by any noble being. Workers' rights were fought for in this State. In that respect, I salute the workers who have been engaged at the coalface of the defence of their rights, be it the Tesco workers, the Dunnes Stores workers, the Luas drivers or any of the others who have had to take this battle on. It is their struggles that will change the face of workers' rights in this country.

I opened a newspaper this morning and saw a piece by John Fitzgerald about the problems of austerity and the type of economics brought in by the previous Government, of which the Labour Party was part. He made the point that women workers were hardest hit. Being the lowest paid and in the most casual employment, women workers suffered most under the Labour Party's watch.

Today, I received a phone call from a woman in my constituency. She has been on a temporary contract for the past five years doing work outsourced by an agency on behalf of the HSE. She is on a zero-hour contract, with no hope of permanency and no guarantee week to week of how many hours she will receive. She cannot get credit from a bank and when she tried to take up an educational course to increase her skills, she could not obtain a loan to pay the fees relating to it. The House should remember what the Labour Party said about college fees as well, but that is another story.

The practice of outsourcing and privatisation is at the heart of this race to the bottom that is under way. Outsourcing good jobs to private companies undermines workers' conditions and job security. It also undermines the efficiency of the services that are to be delivered. We could mention many examples but I will just mention that of the laundry department at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, where the HSE has systematically cut funding to on-site services and has had to alternatively outsource the latter, in a piecemeal fashion, to a private company. It is not efficient, it costs the HSE more and it undermines workers' jobs. Of course, it is no wonder that is happening when we see all of the labour activation schemes that were facilitated by the previous Government - the discredited JobBridge and Gateway programmes.

When we consider all of the companies that have shafted union members, it is a bit rich for the Labour Party to move this motion. I will end by referring to the Greyhound dispute. A company registered in the Isle of Man, which refused to publish the profits it made from the privatisation of waste collection, slashed the wages of permanent workers, enforced new contracts overnight without consultation, locked the workers out and blatantly hired scab labour to undermine their jobs. Labour did nothing. It is too late for that now. I fully support the Sinn Féin amendment.

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