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

With our Protection of Employment (Measures to Counter False Self-Employment) Bill 2018 we certainly do not want to interfere with the status of genuinely employed self-employed people or bring them into an employee framework. No one is interested in that because those thousands of people provide jobs and work extremely hard. A common misconception is that parties are free to choose whether they provide services, whether employee or self-employed, and can sign their contracts accordingly. That is codswallop. The people who are in the superior position impose their view upon the people in the lesser position. The Minister should remember that, in reality, the test of employment status is a matter of law and not determined by the label attached to the relationship by the parties. This is why in our Bill we have a number of measures which will be of help in this regard and will get down to ensuring a way to identify the relationship. It is a very important Bill and I hope it gets full support. The Minister talks about getting the income disregard for lone parents sorted out, the pension anomalies and all the other anomalies that were created after the 2012 changes. These must be tackled, and fair play to the Minister for going about tackling them. She could do with money and it is being lost as a result of bogus self-employment. I support these projects in every way and would like to be allocated them and gather the information from people. It is about time we deal with this, but there are rogue employers out there fooling decent employees into feeling that there is no choice. They are put on a certain contract and that is what they have to take: otherwise, it is "down the road with you" and there is someone else to take the person's place.

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