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

I spoke about this on Committee Stage. I made the point that any good employer should be implementing these measures without having any statutory obligation to do so. They should be doing this already. They should be implementing it in a practical way voluntarily, as would any good employer. There should be a system in place for implementing it. Employers will know their existing cohort of part-time employees and the hours they work. The extra hours are critical for many. They need them to generate enough money to eat and survive. The essential thing for workers is putting bread on the table.

There are likely to be some teething problems or practical problems with the implementation of the provision but they are not insurmountable. All an employer has to do is bring forward a code of conduct, negotiated between the employer and the employees, on how additional hours that become available may be allocated. It could be negotiated on the basis of seniority. If somebody is working for the employer for three years, rather than three months, it could be a factor. If someone with a family is working for only 18 hours per week and five become available, most people would agree to his or her getting those hours rather than me.

If the seniority issue or what is equitable is important, there is a way of dealing with that and to whom the hours should be allocated. If extra hours become available for a particular task and the employer has an employee whose competence is required, that person will be on the staff so it does not prevent the employer from getting the skill or competence required. It is only prescriptive from the point of view of offering, as Deputy Brady said. It is not compulsory and it does not compel employers to give people work. The employers have to offer it to those people and they can work out a system of doing so. All they have to do is comply.

It is a legislative supervisory stick for the employer to ensure that a good environment is generated in terms of the employer-employee relationship. That should already be there. It will not be very onerous once a code of practice is put in place for how those surplus hours will be made available to existing part-time employees. That is important. Every good employer will know exactly what is going on, if employers are minding their business at all or if the employers are not being vindictive. If somebody is working 12 or 15 hours and an extra five or six hours become available that could be critical for the person's well-being and economic capacity to survive. I supported the insertion of the provision on Committee Stage. I and my Labour Party colleagues find no basis, reasoned or otherwise, put forward here to resile from that position. It is instructive that we must put this in legislation. There is a huge number of very decent employers across the country but, unfortunately, there are the few who are in prominent positions or who wield a lot of clout or control who are sometimes the focus of legislative intervention. Often it is the small and medium sized employers, as the Minister knows, who try their best to comply with the standards one would expect.

I am very supportive of this provision. Where the WRC and the Labour Court have intervened in terms of advising us on this legislation, and they do not wish to intervene in the policy area, it was to point out practical difficulties and we certainly take them on board. That is critical. However, I do not see anything being pointed out here that is insurmountable from a practical perspective or for the application of the provision. Obviously there will be teething problems but these can be addressed in the Seanad, with a circumscribing of the various ways of how they can be offered to ensure there are no difficulties. This is something that good trade union relations with an employer should be able to work out in any event. I do not anticipate any problems in the workplace. Of course the problem is where there are non-unionised environments and that is where people are exposed to the bad behaviour of some unscrupulous employers.

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