Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Far too many people in this country are suffering because of insecure and precarious employment. Our young people, in particular, find themselves locked out of secure employment, decent conditions and fair pay. Having a set working week and a set wage is, for many people, now only something their parents' generation enjoyed. Too many people find themselves waiting for emails or texts from their managers or co-workers telling them the roster is done, or checking with trepidation to see where and when they are going to be called in to work in the week ahead. Plans for child care or social events go out the window along with the family's budget.

Increasing globalisation and the sense that some employers are getting away with treating their staff very poorly raise huge questions about the future of employment and there appears to many people to be a race to the bottom. The driving down of standards in jobs through low pay, zero-hour contracts, bogus self-employment and the growth of the gig economy all pose major challenges for our society and for young workers in particular.

It is not unreasonable for all workers to know in advance what their expected working week will look like. It is not unreasonable for all workers to know how much money they will be paid from week to week and it is not unreasonable for children to expect to know when their parents will be home from work. A dilution or an erosion of these expectations harms society in general. It harms families and it undermines the ability of people to plan their lives with any kind of certainty. While the Government is to be commended on bringing this Bill forward, the Social Democrats see this as the first piece of a larger suite of measures required to ensure all workers are treated with dignity and respect, and that all work is valued. The Social Democrats have proposed that there be a new deal for young workers, which guarantees fair terms and conditions in order that everyone is assured that their hard work will be properly rewarded. That is not too much for anybody to expect. They have a right to expect that work-life balance is possible and there should be a legitimate expectation that a decent job will allow a person to live a decent life, which is far from the case at the moment.

Fair pay and conditions are vital if we are to achieve high productivity and quality employment, which is evident in so many other countries where there is real social democracy at the heart of their politics. We can only hope the Government will see the value of this approach and choose to treat all workers with the respect they and their work deserve.

Precarious work is not a recent phenomenon and the issues this Bill purports to address have been consistently raised by workers in certain sectors and by the unions that represent them for more than ten years. Despite expert evidence in the form of an extensive and thoroughly researched report on low-hour contracts from the University of Limerick, which was commissioned by a Department, it seems the Minister has chosen to temper the recommendations of the report to satisfy employers. Elements of the Bill as it stands simply fly in the face of evidence-based decision making and I will table amendments to rectify these shortcomings in due course.

The fact that key recommendations of the report were completely ignored to keep employers happy speaks volumes when we look at the reality of the working conditions of those employed on these contracts. Qualitative research, carried out as part of the University of Limerick study, highlighted a number of serious issues for those who are employed on low-hour contracts. The two central issues highlighted are the ideas that people who take up low-hour contracts do so because there is nothing else available for them, as well as the unpredictability of hours and the related issues that stem from that. The idea that individuals are taking on employment described by one organisation as a business school model of running a business, that is, just-in-time for workers, says it all.

According to an ICTU report on low-hour employment practices, the exact number of employees on zero-hour contracts and subject to zero-hour practices in Ireland is unknown but we do know that 8% of workers - more than 150,000 people - work hours that vary considerably on a week-to-week or month-to-month basis. These workers disproportionately work in the retail, hospitality and social care sectors, all sectors where women dominate the workforce. Access to benefits, mortgages and loans and the protection of anti-discrimination law are inhibited by insecure contracted hours. Such arrangements have been shown to have long-term negative impacts on earnings potential and physical and mental health. The Bill should seek to address these issues but, sadly, has been found wanting in a number of respects. While the precise number of employers offering zero-hour contracts here is not available, some estimates can be gleaned by statistics compiled by the CSO. According to congress, employees on zero-hour contracts are likely to be a significant component of the group categorised as underemployed.

Ireland has the highest level of underemployment in the EU bar Spain and the increase in the numbers of underemployed has been substantial. Since the third quarter of 2008, the first year for which Ireland has data, the number of underemployed has increased by 50.5%, compared with growth of 31.9% across the EU during this period. These figures represent a complete indictment of the Government's ability to create quality and sustainable employment.

The second issue highlighted by the report is the broad issue of the unpredictability of hours and the issues that flow from that. In the University of Limerick, UL, report, congress and the National Women's Council of Ireland referred to the impact on individuals who are on low-hour work, which range from not knowing a schedule to waiting for a phone call and guessing hours. Congress argued that even where employees have regular hours, the fact they are on an if-and-when contract leads to anxiety because they do not know which is the week they will not get the hours. How can employees expect to be able to plan their lives around this type of unpredictability? It is simply not reasonable to expect workers to arrange for child care, transport, their personal lives or anything else which we take for granted, on the whim of the person doing the roster for the week.

The second issue is the power imbalance these contracts create for employees. In the qualitative research for the UL report, the National Youth Council of Ireland noted that there was not a relationship of equals between organisations and people on low hours. The National Women's Council argued that people on non-guaranteed hours can become trapped in a cycle of poverty, which strengthens employers' control over them.

Mandate has collected evidence from its members that details how these contracts can be weaponised to punish workers in a very disturbing manner. One worker in a very well-known Irish supermarket complained about a fire exit being blocked. His hours were cut from 40 hours per week to ten for six months as a punitive response. Incredibly, this practice is not illegal as his contract stipulated a minimum of ten hours per week. This represented a 75% cut in this individual's wage. Again, how can a person plan life around this type of uncertainty? This type of hour allocation and wage fluctuation also has implications for welfare claims such as family income supplement and the casual claims for those on jobseeker's payments.

We must now ask whether this Bill addresses the issues identified by the UL report and the unions. The key objectives of the UL study were established by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. They were to fill the gap that existed in terms of the hard data and information about the prevalence of zero-hour contracts in the Irish economy and the manner of their use, to assess the impact of zero-hour contracts on employees and, crucially, to enable the Minister to make any evidence-based policy recommendations to Government considered necessary on foot of the study. If we are to judge the Bill on the third objective, we would have to say the Government has not succeeded. It has rejected and ignored several of the crucial recommendations of the report that would have provided enhanced protection for workers.

As a starting point, it is worth examining who the Bill will actually protect in its current form. According to Dr. Sinéad Pembroke of TASC, the Organisation of Working Time Act provided that employers give 25% of the hours they require someone to be on call for. The UL report revealed that in order to get around the legislation, employers use "if-and-when" contracts. If the employees are available and when the employers have hours, the employers call them for work. The difference between zero-hour and if-and-when contracts is that for the latter, there is no obligation on the employer to offer work and, equally, there is no obligation on the part of the employee to accept meaning that an employee does not have the protection of employment law. Consequently, this Bill does not tackle if-and-when contracts, which as the UL report on the prevalence of zero-hour contracts found, are much more prevalent than zero-hour contracts. Furthermore, zero-hour contracts already have some statutory protection for employees whereas if-and-when contracts do not. The conclusion from reading the various reports from TASC, UL, ICTU and others has been that in a wide range of circumstances, employees on if-and-when contracts rarely feel that their hours are truly optional and fear being "zeroed out" if they do not accept hours which are offered to them. The absence of protections for if-and-when workers is a very serious flaw and seriously undermines the effectiveness of the legislation. I will be tabling amendments to address this issue in due course as I am sure will many other Members because it must be changed.

Nobody should have to work without knowing their rights and this information should be available from the day a person commences their employment. This is a core recommendation of the UL study and is echoed in an ICTU report from last year. Unfortunately, these proposals have been watered down in the Bill, which instead grants this right only from the fifth day of employment and only grants recourse where the employer fails to provide this statement for more than a month so it renders it pretty well meaningless because there are so many restrictions on it. There is simply no reason why this information cannot be made available immediately to employees. People should not spend an entire working week in the dark about their actual hours, pay and terms and conditions and requiring employers to provide this from day one is not an onerous burden when these conditions will typically be very similar for the majority of employees in similar roles. Indeed, in most cases, these conditions can be provided to employees before they begin working at the stage of making a job offer. That is a fair and reasonable expectation for employees to have.

Changing hours at extremely short notice without compensation represents a serious intrusion into the family and social lives of precarious workers. Workers schedule their lives around their work and the practice of cancelling hours at short notice can often put huge financial pressure on employees to work antisocial hours whenever they are offered because they do not know how large or small their next weekly pay cheque will be. While accounting for the fact that sometimes there will be unforeseen circumstances which require an employer to request additional help at short notice, it should be paying its employees for the inconvenience caused. Workers may have to arrange child care at short notice, cancel social occasions and family time in order to perform work thus damaging personal relationships and quality of life. The UL study recommends that the premium for being called in at short notice should be an additional 50%. This provision is not in the Government draft legislation before us and is a key omission which fails to address one of the most serious issues in precarious contracts.

The UL report recommended the introduction of legislation that would require employers to pay any worker it asks to come in for at least three hours at their regular wage whether that work is made available or not. Workers should not be made to come in for extremely short periods of time which take a large period out of their days and require them to pay for transport without sufficient compensation. A weaker version of this provision is in the Bill, which only compensates workers at the national minimum wage or employment regulation order rate rather than their actual wages. This does not provide the certainty that some workers need. We believe anyone who hires a worker has an obligation to provide them with actual work.

The Bill's provisions for banded hours contracts have an 18-month "look-back" period for calculating the average hours and very wide bands. Therefore, it does not protect workers who have not been in employment for a minimum of 18 months. The UL study recommended that this look-back period should be six months while the Oireachtas committee which examined the report recommended 12 months. A very sizeable proportion of employees in the sectors noted for precarious work have not been employed for 18 months and this length of a look-back period increases the incentives to turn over staff when they are approaching this date as there is greater scope to have relatively experienced staff while still avoiding providing those staff with secure hours and wages. The UL report also recommended that these bands should be reviewed on an ongoing basis to prevent employers keeping an employee on an artificially low number of hours. This is absent from the draft legislation. Unions say this long look-back period will lead to exploitation and have drawn attention to the "spread" of the bands as currently set out in the Bill. The Oireachtas committee, TASC, the UL report and unions recommend that the bands be no greater than five hours which would provide a degree of working certainty.

Finally, unions have noted that the Bill as currently constituted does not provide for sufficient protection or recourse for workers who find themselves at the mercy of employers who seek to penalise workers for exercising their rights. The Bill's current provisions against penalisation are difficult to enforce by individual workers given that individual cases of reduction of hours can often be justified by reasons other than penalisation.

The burden of proof should fall to the employer to show that the changes to the work practices were a punitive response to raising concerns.

The issue of bogus self-employment is not addressed in the Bill; it is a glaring omission. The likelihood is that even the meek measures in the Bill when implemented will lead to an increase in the amount of bogus self-employment. Increasing numbers of workers are being forced into this phoney position, which must be addressed. I and other Members of the House will table amendments to the Bill in order to strengthen that area.

I return to the theme of the locked-out generation. In many ways, the most pressing issues we face as a society, such as the housing crisis, the future of pension and welfare provision and so on, impact most on those who will come after us. The type of working world that we design for them is no different. In many ways, it is the issue that will impact most on their lives. If we deny young people the ability to earn a fair wage in a fair way, what kind of society are we creating? It is a society that many people feel excludes them. It is a society that will not be inclusive and will not work satisfactorily for all. We cannot afford to create that kind of society. Action must be taken. The Bill fails to address the key issues involved and must be substantially amended.

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