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

He complained to the employer. That is the problem. Unless there will be a very proactive move by the authorities, with inspections and raids happening on a much greater level, all the legislation in the world will make no difference. A person is legally entitled to a payslip but workers are not getting them. Such practice is rampant in the construction industry. There is also the problem of agencies, as it means there is a buffer for the main contractor, which might be responsible for big sites. This legislation does not deal with agencies abusing people at will with respect to hours of employment. If anybody kicks up about such issues, he or she is gone and will not get work again for months. What will we do about this?

The final demand of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, is not included in the legislation. I have raised it, along with many others here, time and again. It is bogus self-employment, which is rampant in construction and other areas. There are serious allegations about this happening in the film industry and we have been getting reports similar to what we have received week in, week out, month in, month out, year in and year out from construction workers for the past decade. If workers walk on to a site and ask for PAYE employment, they can forget it as they will be shown the door. They either agree to being classified as subcontractor or they can forget it. The employer does not want to have any responsibility or give sick or holiday pay, or the various entitlements a person might have in direct employment.

It is very obviously the case that these workers are not entrepreneurs. The numbers of supposed entrepreneurs in construction are ridiculous, with the latest figures at approximately 60,000 from the total construction work force of approximately 130,000. Nearly half of construction workers in this country seem to be entrepreneurs, including the labourers. It is an absolute joke. To be classified as self-employed and an entrepreneur, a series of conditions must be met but they do not apply to these workers. Nobody is independently assessing this and instead the employer can go online and classify people as self-employed. That is the way it works. The onus is put on the worker again in this respect. When I mention the problem in this House I am told a worker can get on to the Revenue Commissioners and complain but if they do this, they will get sacked or blacklisted and never get on a site again. That is what happens. We now see allegations of similar carry-on in the film industry. None of it is dealt with in the legislation.

We will support the passage of the Bill because anything is better than nothing but I do not believe the suggestion that it will substantially address the plague of precarious employment which is affecting hundreds of thousands of workers. There are too many get-out clauses. It looks to me as if the employers have lobbied the Government intensively to dilute the legislation to ensure that it is easy for them to get around it. This is not good enough because, to return to my original point, profits have gone through the roof in every single sector where precarious and temporary employment and bogus self-employment are rampant. These are the sectors that have seen dramatic increases in profitability. Precarious employment is good for some but it is very bad for huge numbers of workers, and employers are lobbying and having an influence on the framing of this legislation which the Government claimed would address the issue of precarity.

We will seek to amend the Bill and I suspect many others will too. I welcome that we are at least debating it but we have to go a hell of a lot further than this if we are to address the problem.

In my last 43 seconds, I will raise one other matter about the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection, which is the appeals process. Take, for example, the Rhatigan dispute where the workers had a ruling in their favour. Rhatigan appealed it and the matter went into the social welfare appeals office where the appeal hearing was a kangaroo court.

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