Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputies Paul Murphy and Mick Barry, though the latter is not here yet.

We in People Before Profit welcome this Bill. We will vote for it and we want to see it progress beyond Second Stage. However, we will seek to amend and strengthen its provisions and ensure there is a legal, mandatory statutory sick pay scheme for all workers in this country. The Government amendment spins it that the Government will legislate for a sick pay scheme but that it will take time. I do not believe a word of that. I have absolutely no faith that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael or the Green Party can be trusted to return to this issue in six months. The Covid crisis has shown us the effects of allowing employers to evade the responsibility of providing a sick pay scheme, especially in the meat plants. It is literally a matter of life and death for these workers, who cannot wait.

When it comes to the rights of workers and entitlements, Ireland is the sick man of Europe and we have been for decades. Compared to other countries like France, Germany, Finland and Sweden, we are at the bottom of the table for basic rights and the provision of entitlements and public services, with less annual leave, fewer public holidays and less full-paid maternity and paternity leave. Workers have no legal right to join a trade union and have it recognised or negotiated with by their employer. We have constitutional rights which protect property, privilege and wealth over the provision of public goods. We pretend that employers and workers are equal in position and power. It is incredible that the State, through its unwillingness to tackle bogus self-employment, ensures the social fund used to pay for workers' benefits is deliberately defrauded on a grand scale day in, day out, while our former Taoiseach wages war on welfare. He and his Government were happy to allow corporate cheats to cheat us all. This is largely a result of political choices made in this House and the weakness of the party that claims to represent workers and to be the party of Connolly and the trade union movement.

It is an outstanding irony that this Bill was brought here in a flurry of PR releases and media grandstanding by the Labour Party. It must hope or believe that the working class and the trade union movement will have a bout of collective amnesia. Its memory may be short-term but the hurt and misery it has inflicted on workers and the most vulnerable will not be forgiven or forgotten anytime soon. It was the Labour Party and a Labour Minister that decided in its last turn in government that workers should be forced to wait six days before they received any sick pay from the State. The Labour Party extended those waiting days. The period without State benefit was extended from three to six days with no compulsion on employers to fill the gap. One would wonder what the party of Connolly thought workers were supposed to do for six days with no income. The Labour Party adopted this policy, as in so many areas, in the belief that workers must wait. It only took a global pandemic to reverse that particular cut brought in by the Labour Party, though I am sure the current Administration will try to revert back to that position as soon as it gets the chance.

Many a public sector worker will have an ironic laugh at the fact that the Labour Party is now championing a mandatory sick pay scheme. The Labour Party attacked and radically overhauled the sick pay scheme available to public servants, teachers, nurses, many of our front-line workers and those in the Civil Service. It closed the door on new recruits having the same rights and entitlements to sick pay in the public service that had existed previously. It shamefully joined the attacks on pension entitlements of public sector workers and the campaign to divide the public and private sectors. It rode in with plans to extend the age at which workers could get the State pension and changed the bands on the amount workers could expect to live on when they retired. For this, it supported the FEMPI legislation that represented the greatest assault on trade union collective bargaining in the history of the State. Now the Labour Party has moved a Bill to make sick pay mandatory. That is very good indeed, but it is going to have to move much more to convince workers and the most vulnerable in this country that it is anything other than a mudguard for the parties of the bosses and employers in this State.

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