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

Precarious employment is an extremely important issue and the Government's move in the direction of addressing it is long overdue. Precarious employment is a plague affecting large numbers of workers and one of the most terrible consequences of three decades of neoliberal policy under the guise of flexibility and competitiveness, two of the favourite words of employers. As a result, the conditions of employment for hundreds of thousands of workers have been severely degraded. Once upon a time, workers could expect some employment security and some sense of what their working week or month would look like. Nowadays, hundreds of thousands of workers are in temporary employment and do not know from week to week or month to month what hours they will work and, as a consequence, what earnings they will have. This has serious financial and personal implications for the workers in question, many of whom are women with families who suffer particularly from this type of precarious employment.

Precarious employment has serious impacts on family life and workers' ability to plan and have a life because they do not know how many hours they will work or how much they will earn. For example, the notion of securing a mortgage has become a complete fantasy for large numbers of workers owing to the precarious nature of their employment and the remuneration they may receive for it. In any event, low pay also plagues the sectors in which precarious employment is rife. Approximately 20% of workers in this country are low paid and in working in terrible, precarious jobs.

To put some perspective on the claims of economic recovery and the often trumpeted figures about employment, for which the Government slaps itself on the back, despite the increase in employment in recent years, there are now 109,000 fewer permanent jobs than there were in 2008. The ongoing process of implementing neoliberal policy in this country, which has been largely championed by the Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil parties for three decades, intensified during the period of austerity. For neoliberals, the crash was as if all their birthdays had arrived at once because the economic downturn provided employers with an excuse to ramp up precarious employment. Workers were so desperate for employment that employers had the whip hand and were able to employ people under precarious conditions. The quality of life of hundreds of thousands of low paid workers is diminished greatly by having to put up with these conditions.

It is worth noting the deterioration in the quality of life for workers in precarious employments when compared with the conditions enjoyed by previous generations of workers who could expect to be able to put a roof over their heads, make plans in life and obtain a pension. All of these expectations have been degraded for large numbers of workers. At the same time, many people have done very well because profits have increased significantly as a result of this development in the past decade.

It is not the case that we all felt the same pain in the past ten years. With the exception of 2008, employers have been doing better under austerity. The economic collapse worked for employers and the rich because it gave them the whip hand and allowed them to drive up profits. Since 2008, profits have gone through the roof. As I have noted several times, wealth inequality has grown dramatically and is linked to the downgrading of conditions for workers and a consequent boost of profits for employers. Another indicator of how the balance has shifted in favour of employers to the detriment of workers is that while wages accounted for approximately 60% of national income in the 1970s, with profits and shares accounting for the remaining 40%, the inverse is now the case. In Ireland, this reversal has been more significant that in any other country in Europe, with 60% of the national cake currently going to employers in the form of profits and only 40% going to workers. There has been a dramatic shift of wealth from the have-nots to the haves in recent decades, as reflected in the astonishing rise in wealth inequality in society.

On the face of it, the Bill attempts to address some aspects of precarious employment. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions sent a letter to the Minister after it published a document on precarious work. In its executive summary, ICTU makes a number of demands for dealing with precarious employment, including the provision of statements of core conditions and compensation for employees who are called into work to find they are not given hours of work, measures to deal with banded hours and the imposition of penalties on employers who fail to comply with legal requirements.

On the face of it, the Government has responded to the lobbying of the trade union movement but in looking at the detail, we can see the Government has diluted the propositions to the point where the Bill will be barely effective at all in many circumstances.

We can give some examples of how the Government has diluted the proposals. The bands proposed by the Government in the Bill are so wide as to give enormous flexibility to employers to continue imposing a great deal of precariousness on affected workers. The first band is between one and ten hours and there is a hell of a difference between one hour and nine hours. The next band is between 11 and 24 hours; if a contract indicates a person will generally work 12 hours in a week but that person consistently works 23 hours per week, under the Government's proposals that worker will not move into a different band and will have no claim to say the employer is being unfair. This can be systematically abused. In contrast, Deputy Cullinane's Bill on banded hours had several more bands. If the hours people were asked to work by the employer varied on a regular basis across the narrower bands, the worker could claim to move to a different band and for this to be acknowledged as a condition of employment. This suits the employers and does not really change much in what they will do in abusing the position of many vulnerable workers.

If a person is trying to plan life around kids, family and time off, having to do everything people have to do, with the variation in a working pattern up to 13 hours in a week, it can have a huge impact. If that happens on a regular basis, there would potentially be enormous consequences for family, earnings and all the knock-on effects. This could happen systematically even if this legislation is passed, so it is not good enough and must be substantially amended.

There are similar concerns with the compensation for workers called in who do not receive work. The University of Limerick, which did the study that is supposed to inform this legislation, proposed that if a person was called in but did not get work, he or she would get the normal wage for that employment for three hours. Under this legislation, the payment rate will be the national minimum wage, which is substantially less than the payment that could be due in many cases, unless it is covered by an employment regulation order. Many types of employment are not covered by those orders, so that is not good enough. The Government must explain why it has diluted and downgraded compensation that would accrue to employees called in under those circumstances.

The provision of contracts and statements of terms and conditions within five days is an improvement but there is a big problem that is fundamental to this Bill. Workers' rights and employment legislation are as we speak being flouted left, right and centre. Even the existing inadequate and weak legislation is being flouted all over the place. I mentioned the Boland's Mills site, which is an iconic site connected to the 1916 Rising, which is seeing enormous redevelopment. The main contractor there will also be doing the new national children's hospital. I have heard reports of workers, many but not all of them immigrant workers, getting paid dramatically less than the sectoral rate for the area by a subcontractor. These workers feel very vulnerable and do not know their rights and entitlements. Part of the problem is that the main contractor can wash its hands of this as a subcontractor has been brought in. The subcontractor keeps changing name and it has operated under several guises. Those workers are very vulnerable and frightened and they do not know their rights. They are being underpaid dramatically and they are not getting payslips.

I know this because an Irish person employed as a foreman on that site complained about the underpayment of these workers and the fact that many workers, including himself, were not getting payslips. He said he would not put up with it unless something was done. He started a protest but nothing has been done.

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