Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank all Deputies for contributing to the debate. I applaud my colleague, Deputy Alan Kelly, for taking up the baton from Senators Ivana Bacik and Gerakd Nash. It is a baton that started its journey many moons ago in the most capable hands of our dear former colleague in this House who is now Uachtarán na hÉireann, Michael D. Higgins, who felt passionately about this issue.

As other Deputies have very thoughtfully contributed to this debate, we need to reflect on the future of work in this country because work has changed. There has been a casualisation of work. Above all else, we need to have a predictable future for working people in order that nobody on a Sunday evening is worried about how many hours they will get in the coming week or how many days they will be called on. It is almost like the hiring fairs of the past:

Go deo deo arís ní raghad go Caiseal,

Ag díol ná ag reic mo shláinte,

Bodairí na tíre ag tíocht ar a gcapaill,

á fhiafraí an bhfuilim híreálta

It is almost like that again. We have a situation where there are people who do not know with any predictability that they will have sufficient income to pay their way in the coming week. That is why measures like this are important and groundbreaking.

I express my appreciation to both the Minister and the Minister of State present, but particularly to the Minister, Deputy Mary Mitchell O'Connor. I know that often the default position of a Department is to say no. It takes a lot more effort to say maybe, even if there are difficulties, and to see if they can be addressed. That was the approach the Minister took to my colleagues in the Seanad and it is appreciated. It is an indication that there can be co-operative effort to bring an effective solution to people with real problems if there is a will to do it rather than simply a rejection of it.

I thank my colleagues across the House, including Deputy Niall Collins of Fianna Fáil, who supported the Bill. He made a very important point when he spoke about the need to ensure speedy enactment because too many Bills have passed Second Stage and then entered a sort of limbo land. I ask everybody here to give a commitment that we will have speedy passage through the committee since there is fair wind with this House.

Similarly I thank the Sinn Féin Deputies for their support of the Bill. They have introduced very important legislation themselves and, whenever that happens, I can assure them that they will have the solid support of the Labour Party in the advancement of any workers' rights.

In respect of Deputy Michael Harty's comment, I will say a word about it in a moment if I have time. It was about narrowing the focus. It is true that we had a wider focus in the original legislation but it is not true that this is an end in itself. This is pathfinding legislation that allows other categories through over time. I will say a little more about that.

I should really not be drawn into commenting on Deputy Mattie McGrath because he was the only discordant voice in what was a very constructive debate. He said nothing really about the Bill. He probably has not read the Bill, but dragged himself out just to be a discordant voice. It is not helpful because workers have real issues. People are dependent on us to be mature and act positively. Trump-like, he spoke about our record in relation to labour law. We, in the previous Dáil, in the worst of times, brought in protective legislation that was not achieved anywhere else on the planet, including the broadening of collective bargaining, the restoration of registered employment agreements, the legislation for sectoral employment orders and so much more. We increased the minimum wage twice and established the Low Pay Commission while the Deputy was a cheerleader for the destruction of those very basic supports.

I said this was a genuinely important measure and I mean that. It is important to realise that this Bill is not just about the categories that have been mentioned by many: the voice-over actors, the session musicians and the freelance journalists. Irish Equity has, through SIPTU, been pushing this measure from the very start. The Bill is important because, for the first time, it attempts to define and regulate a phenomenon we have been grappling with for almost half a century, which is this concept of bogus self-employment. That phenomenon was as much a feature of the building industry as it was of the newsroom. In fact the construction industry, as other Deputies have referenced, was riddled was bogus subcontractors and agency workers who found themselves without the most basic safety net when the crash came. Some 250,000 workers lost their jobs when the crash came, a huge number of them on the construction side. People who were forced into being so-called self-employed found that they had no recourse when their industries collapsed.

We all know about the growth of atypical employment and the decline of the standard permanent and pensionable employment model that we thought was the standard. Our legislation has adapted to cover those in full-time work, part-time work, fixed-term work and so on. It covers all these categories, as Deputy Alan Kelly said, but our law has not adapted properly to deal with those who it is claimed are not workers at all but who it is claimed are self-employed entrepreneurs, which I think was the phrase used. The distinction between workers and self-employed still depends of a set of common law rules. Not many cases come to court, although the Labour Court has regularly had to deal with them. In administrative terms, the rules are policed by the Revenue Commissioners, the Department of Social Protection and the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and its agencies, but despite all the policing, or perhaps because the policing is too dispersed and the rules too uncertain, there is widespread, almost institutionalised, abuse.

The victims are the workers who are lured out of the coverage of our worker protection laws that we have been putting in place for decades, out of our social insurance schemes that we have developed over decades and out of the Exchequer. The result is a growing number of people in precarious, non-standard employment that is not just poorly paid and insecure but is completely outside the protection of developed employment law. It is the basic inequality of bargaining power between employers and workers that forces workers into poor rates of pay combined with low and variable hours, little structured training and limited career progression. So much for the hype around the so-called gig economy, a new term, in essence, for bogus self-employment. Employers say they need a level of flexibility to operate their business. That might be the case in some instances, but flexible work is one thing. Insecure work is quite another. Not knowing from one week to the next what hours or pay one might be getting is no way for any family in the 21st century to exist.

My priorities and those of my party are all about making sure the benefits of growth are fairly shared among everybody in society. We have no interest in jobs at any price or the spread of casual labour at the lowest wages that can be paid. The Government must not preside over an economy that is fuelled by a ruthless race to the bottom. We have seen this now and we are going to be challenged on it in respect of the destruction of very decent terms and conditions, for example, for bus workers in an important semi-State company. I am asking, as I did during questions to the Taoiseach, that there be a standard wage rate set for workers such as bus drivers in order that the competition can take place, not on the basis of driving down wages and terms and conditions but on the quality of the service and the bus, the frequency of service and so on. All these things are critically important.

In the early months of this Dáil we tabled our first motion as the Labour Party and it was unanimously accepted. It was a motion on workers' rights that outlined a programme of work to tackle abusive terms and condition of employment, low pay, insecure hours, and enforced and bogus employment. We set out a clear agenda of worker protection that was approved by this House. Approving the Bill before us and securing its speedy passage into law will give practical reality to the intentions set out in that specific motion we put before the House. It will mean a practical and urgent step to tackle bogus self-employment and bring these perverse abuses to an end. I am very pleased that there is such cross-party and cross-Member support for this important initiative.

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