Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Of all the changes that have happened in recent decades for individuals and families, perhaps the changes to the structure of work have been the most difficult and challenging. On the one hand, we are all delighted to see people involved in entrepreneurship and building new companies and businesses but, on the other, I doubt if there is a person here who does not know of a job or job situation where the core work somebody has been doing has been stripped down with the wage attaching to the employment with, essentially, the job being reduced to the lowest common denominator in a race to the bottom. When our current President and former member of the Labour Party Parliamentary Party set out the initial proposal in this legislation, it was when that move to deskill and strip down jobs had begun in order that people entered into not just genuine self-employment but bogus self-employment. The Labour Party, through Michael D. Higgins, countered this with the proposal that notwithstanding the structures set out in the Competition Act, people who were traditionally freelance or self-employed such as journalists, actors, people doing voice-overs in radio and TV advertising and people running small-scale businesses on an individual basis such as those operating kennels would be provided with a mechanism for recognition in order that their basic rights as human beings working over a long period of time in a particular employment would be recognised, acknowledged and protected by all of the labour legislation in place at the time concerning terms, conditions and hours of work rather than their entrepreneurship being interfered with in any way. Nowadays, particularly in social democratic countries, people are protected by a structure of living wages, minimum wages and terms of basic decency in respect of terms and conditions.

I am very happy that the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation is here because she has inherited a situation in her Department, as had the Minister for Social Protection, where the unemployment rate has fallen consistently. Let us be very clear. We want people back at work, but we want them employed on decent terms and conditions and for them to be able to join a trade union. I assume that as somebody who worked in primary education over a long period of time prior to her political career, the Minister would have been an active member of the INTO. The Minister knows that primary schools have conditions that ensure staff are treated with some decency and have the right to collective bargaining and access to remedies that brings. I note that this month marks the 70th anniversary of the death of Jim Larkin, somebody who set the standards for labour, industrial relations and the right to form and join a union in this country. I hope Fianna Fáil will support this legislation, as it has done in the Seanad. Make no mistake about it - there is no point in having a society where young people who have been working for ten years and want to get a mortgage with their partner or on their own find out when they bring in their contract of employment or description of employment that they are unable to obtain a mortgage because there is no certainty, no legal framework and no protection.

Last week I spent a morning talking to people and a number of union officials from Mandate about the Tesco strike. What is involved there, which we see every time we go shopping, is the attempt to strip down jobs. It concerns people who are working on fairly decent pay and conditions. We know many of them agreed to take the package on offer, but what fewer people know is that there are another 3,500 or 3,600 people behind them, many of whom have been working in my or other local Tesco branches for 20 or 25 years, whose jobs, entitlements and rights will be stripped down. We need to be clear about where we stand on it.

We read about Bus Éireann. How many times in this country has €9 million stood in the way of finding a real solution to an industrial relations difficulty through bargaining and the employer and trade unions looking at the terms and conditions of work and issues like productivity and negotiating? We have a Minister for Transport, Tourism and Sport who is hands-off and says, "Don't touch me on this," but that is not good enough. We normally have the Independents in the Independent Alliance sitting close by. The Minister of State, Deputy Finian McGrath, like the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, has been an active member of the INTO. We are asking him to come in here and stand up for workers' rights and the right to decent pay and conditions, and collective bargaining. We are asking the same of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and the Minister of State, Deputy Seán Canney. In a Dáil that I once saw labelled "the do-nothing Dáil", I ask that we put aside our party differences and look at young people entering work with hope and expectation but finding out that they have no framework to obtain their rights as people offering their fantastic skills and services to an employer who is making them a contractor, consultant or associate. In all of those situations, some of which are in relatively highly paid positions, the end result is that the people pay a low rate of social insurance as a self-employed person which means that should they have an accident or illness, they have no cover. Should they experience a spell of unemployment, accessing cover if their partner is working will prove very difficult on a means-tested basis.

When commentators talk about young people being disenchanted with politics, the Dáil needs to look tonight at what legislation like this would mean. I remember when we reversed the €1 cut in the minimum wage that Fianna Fáil had brought in and people said to me, "Nobody will care. It affects only 70,000 or so women." People did actually care. The end result is that, with the Labour Party in government, we established a Low Pay Commission. The Minister's lowest point was probably that 10 cent an hour increase in the minimum wage because this is fundamental to how a modern economy will prosper. It will only prosper if workers get decent pay and conditions. We all know we came through hard times when it was difficult to achieve that but those times are past and now is the time to improve and implement improvements in workers' pay and conditions.

When one is in difficulty in a job, one's greatest protection is, generally speaking, one's trade union. The workers who are weakest are those who do not have a trade union or a collective voice to which to reach out that will act on their behalf to protect their best interests. That is what the Bill is about.

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