Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Minister will recall - he may have the information in his briefing papers - that when we agreed to establish this, ICTU, SIPTU and various other trade unions had identified potential losses of more than €80 million to the Exchequer per annum in taxation, PRSI and other payments. That is not an inconsiderable amount of money.

Critically, people in bogus self-employment find themselves without the ordinary protections of labour law which ensure that their employment is properly regulated, they are at least paid the minimum wage and, as per the legislation that we introduced while in government, there are structured agreements in certain sectors between employers and the workers' trade union representatives.

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