Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will veer very readily back to the Bill. As stated, Fianna Fáil cut the minimum wage and we restored it twice. We established the Low Pay Commission and dealt with a host of other issues I do not have time to discuss. I am very proud of what we did on labour law in the worst of times.

The Bill before us is very important. It will exempt voice-over actors, session musicians and freelance journalists from competition law. They should never have been captured by it. In my judgment, that was a perverse interpretation of competition law. I acknowledge the work of ICTU, SIPTU, the NUJ, Irish Equity, the Musicians' Union of Ireland and many more, including individuals, who have travelled over the past 15 years on a journey to set this right. It was a very difficult process because competition law, as interpreted by the European Commission, was a real obstacle for these workers, who are entitled to be represented collectively but who were defined as sole traders.

In arguing this, we may have deliberately underscored the importance of the legislation. In my judgment, it will have long-term, far-reaching implications. The Minister has the power to add new categories to those already defined in the Bill. Perhaps more important, the legislation defines in law the notion of bogus self-employment for the first time. In recent years, we have all come across individual workers who have been forced to categorise themselves as self-employed although, by any objective analysis, they are waged employees who should be entitled to the protection of normal labour law and collective bargaining. As my colleague Senator Ged Nash said, this is a genuine game-changer for workers in the so-called gig economy. It will provide them with a clear roadmap to achieve collective bargaining rights and it will vindicate their democratic right to organise and negotiate fair pay and conditions, which other Members have referenced.

The Labour Party has taken the concept of the future of work as its major focus for the coming months. This will be the first of many initiatives we hope to take in this regard. I look forward to seeing the proposals in regard to the definition of work. This is now an important issue. I look forward to working with other Deputies in shaping definitions. The casualisation of work has occurred. There has not been a countervailing legal framework to protect workers as there has been for capital, which is now globally organised and globally mobile. It is workers who have suffered as a result.

Construction labourers were forced to work as self-employed contractors although they never were. Airline pilots were required to do the same. Companies required individual airline pilots to negotiate themselves and they were forbidden from having collective agreements. That is wrong. This set of protections will be groundbreaking and will expand to cover a lot of new forms of employment. The Bill makes clear that Ireland will not accept some of the predatory approaches to workers that have now become accepted elsewhere. One Deputy has already declared himself to be self-employed. The notions that one would be required to be self-employed when one is self-evidently working for a company and that some companies operating in this town require people to be sole traders even though they are all working for companies in an organised fashion are quite wrong.

Some of the history of this matter has been touched upon. I, too, acknowledge that it was 11 years ago that this was first mooted by our then colleague, President Michael D. Higgins. In her light reading, the Minister, Deputy Mitchell O'Connor, might have a look at the transcripts from that period. The spokesperson from her own party at the time trenchantly opposed what I have advocated, arguing that it was fundamentally wrong. I will not tell her who that was. That will be her revelation for later on.

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