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

I acknowledge that the Minister wants to root out this practice and deal with the primary motivation of rogue employers. A genuine employer does not want to misrepresent the status of his or her workers to avoid paying tax or PRSI, but fraud is fraud no matter where it occurs. If an ordinary worker fails to do something, the entire panoply of the State comes down on top of him or her over a few pence and he or she is named, blamed and shamed. The Labour Party introduced the Protection of Employment (Measures to Counter False Self Employment) Bill 2017 which took an holistic approach to determine and classify employment status. A clear set of rules was to be set out in statute law to apply to all State bodies and enforced across the board by the courts and administrative tribunals. It sought to amend tax law and measures on avoidance to deal with bogus self-employment and apply PRSI. If such a measure was in place, it would be a major deterrent. There would be no fear that anybody would want to classify one way or the other. Employers who might consider forcing a person to go down the route of false self-employment would think twice and probably five times before he or she would do so. I know that is what the Minister wants. Perhaps we might not need to go to these lengths and that the Minister's campaign will succeed. I wish the initiative well because it is something on which the Labour Party has been very focused, together with the trade unions, and we will remain so until the issue is finally resolved and everybody is classified appropriately to their employment status.

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