Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 77:

In page 69, between lines 30 and 31, to insert the following:“73.The Minister shall, within 6 months of the passing of this Act, bring a report on the revenue implications of bogus self-employment, i.e. the misclassification of PAYE workers as self-employed.”.

While I realise we are approaching the end of the debate, I consider this amendment one of the most important that we have tabled. It calls on the Minister to produce, within six months, of the passing of the Bill, a report on the implications of bogus self-employment, namely, the misclassification of PAYE workers as self-employed. This is an important issue for workers and their rights, particular in the construction sector.

I put forward this amendment as a tribute to a friend, colleague and comrade who tragically lost his life on the weekend before last. His name was Billy McClurg and he was a bricklayer and trade union activist.

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He was somebody who acquainted me with the plight of building workers and bricklayers who were fighting for the right to have decent conditions of employment and pay on building sites in the construction sector. His loss is, obviously, first and foremost, a loss for his partner, June, his children, Emma, John and Rachel, and his many grandchildren and family and friends. They will feel the loss of him, as a father and a family man, acutely, and even more so because of the particular conditions of his death were tragic in that he took his own life - something his family were happy that I would say publicly because they, like many other people, feel that the issue of suicide needs to be highlighted so that we confront it and let people know out there who have suicidal ideation that it is okay to speak out about these matters and that we should have a society which supports and helps those who face that dilemma.

I knew Billy as an activist. He taught me about the continuing dilemma of thousands of building workers who want to fight - this is the irony of many of the issues we have discussed over the course of this Bill - for the right to pay tax. Is that not amazing? We have spent all of ten or 11 hours discussing how some, such as big corporations, property speculators, banks and the very wealthy, do everything in their power not to pay tax but there are thousands of workers out there in precarious situations, skilled workers in the case of the late Billy McClurg, trained, qualified and passionate about what they do.

Billy, in particular, was a precision bricklayer. In and out of work, he was concerned that things were done perfectly, whether it was his garden, the state of the roads and the streets in his area, or on the building sites that he worked, that the work was done properly to the highest standard. He spent much of his working life fighting for the right to pay tax and to be employed properly with proper pay and conditions.

He and his many of his comrades - I stood with them at many building sites around this city - were forced to protest and to take strike action because they were denied the right by building contractors to be directly employed. Those contractors wanted to misclassify them as being self-employed so that they would not have to pay for their employees' benefits such as PRSI, sick pay, holiday pay, pension entitlements and bank holidays and would be able to dismiss them, to hire them and fire them, whenever they wanted - something that still tens of thousands of workers are affected by. These were workers who wanted to pay tax and they wanted to ensure that the best quality standards of work were done on building sites.

Thirteen years ago, I stood outside a picket in Ballybrack on a public contract site where we were protesting. Billy and two of his colleagues ended up in prison for that protest because they defied an injunction telling them to stop picketing. I remember Billy pointing at the subcontractors who were inside who were supposedly self-employed and saying, "Those guys are not qualified bricklayers. These houses will fall apart in a few years". They were council houses which were being built to replace council houses that previously had fallen apart because they had also been built by cowboy builders. Ironically, 13 years on, just as Billy predicted, because the building standards were not applied and, almost certainly, the bricklayers who were working on that site were not qualified bricklayers, those houses are falling apart and will have to be paid for to be remediated with public money. Here was somebody who fought all his life and went to jail because he wanted the right to pay tax and he wanted the work done properly on building sites.

What he was fighting for is still relevant today. Up to 60,000 construction workers working on building sites are being falsely classified by employers as being self-employed when they very obviously are not and, consequently, they are losing as workers, in terms of pay and conditions. We will only find out in years to come that in many cases the quality of the work from the Celtic tiger era may be substandard, but also the public purse is losing out because if they are not PAYE workers, we do not get the tax revenue in.

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