Willie Penrose (Longford-Westmeath, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I hope I get a little latitude. Bogus self-employment contracts effectively deny workers the same level of protection and entitlement their employed colleagues enjoy. I note the report commissioned by my colleague, Deputy Joan Burton, has finally been published. Bogus self-employment is a scourge of many industries, hitting the construction industry, the gig economy and the IT sector particularly hard. The figures that were postulated and arrived at in the study to which the Minister refers are difficult to believe. There is very little real information on the number of people who might be in so-called false self-employment. The report relies on CSO figures, but the CSO quarterly national household survey relies on self-reporting. This means that if people tell the CSO they are employees, that is how they are recorded. For all we know, it might be false self-employment, but they think they are employed. As Deputy O'Dea said, they sign bits of paper without knowing the details of what they are signing. The spread of these arrangements results in a loss of PRSI and tax income to the State, leaves people without entitlements and makes it very difficult for workers to bargain collectively for better terms and conditions. Of course, it suits the employers. Employers force workers into disguised self-employment arrangements and those workers are to all intents and purposes direct employees in all but name. As I said, they lose their rights as workers and their social welfare entitlements. This behaviour cheats the State out of tens of millions of euro in lost PRSI income and tax revenue, which means less money for social welfare which the Minister needs and for hospitals and schools. It is time to bring an end to this because it is rampant.

Deputy O'Dea is right: many of us in our everyday activity meet people who lose out badly. I know a code of practice was introduced in 2007 that set out criteria designed to help determine whether a worker is an employee or a genuinely self-employed contractor, but given the alarming growth in false self-employment since the code was first introduced, it is clear this initiative has not served the workers well. My colleague, Senator Gerald Nash, who is the Labour Party spokesman on social protection, is bringing forward the Protection of Employment (Measures to Counter False Self-Employment) Bill 2018. It will be introduced in the Seanad next week and I anticipate that it will receive widespread support. We must tackle this. It is a scourge for the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and SIPTU. All the unions are concerned about it.

I will ask the Minister only one question. Will she put on record the number of cases determined by the scope section for the most recent year for which the data are available? That would be interesting. How many people in the scope section are allocated to this task and how many inquiries has it had in this regard over the past year or so?

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