Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

In June, NESC produced a paper called "How We Value Work: The Impact of Covid-19". One of the conclusions it drew is that Covid-19 has made good jobs better and poor jobs worse. That is an extremely interesting conclusion and the paper featured a fascinating graph, which I would be interested to know if the Taoiseach has seen. The graph shows that the people least impacted by Covid-19 tend to be the best paid people with the best ability to work remotely and so on. They are also less economically affected. The worst impacted and least remunerated are the people we have depended on most.

There is a great deal to be said about this and how we have failed to reward those who have carried and will carry us through the restrictions. One of the most damning examples is that of healthcare workers. They are subject to the highest risk and many of them are among the lowest rewarded. A shocking example of this, although there are multiple examples, was the case of nurses who applied under the Be On Call for Ireland campaign being put on agency contracts, to which unfair dismissal protections and sick pay do not apply. As I revealed last week, contact tracers were placed on zero-hour contracts. A few hours after I exposed this, we were told that it was a mistake, even though it was all over their contracts. Even if it was a mistake, which it was not, unfair dismissal protections and sick pay do not apply to contact tracing workers. It is no wonder we do not have the contact tracers to get on top of the virus.

Another egregious example is that of student nurses, who because of protest, were given healthcare assistant pay in March and April but who are working for nothing again. Thousands of student nurses who are effectively working as nurses and care assistants are not getting a red cent. The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, suggests that, such is the exploitation of this group of student nurses, the HSE does not bother to directly recruit permanent healthcare assistants, which we desperately need. It can rely on the slave student nurses who also cannot do other work to boost their incomes because Covid-19 restrictions would mean they would be carrying infections into the hospitals, which they are effectively holding together in many cases while getting nothing.

This is unacceptable. This is fighting Covid-19 on the cheap, which will not succeed. This is a big part of the reason we are in this mess, with the levels of infections we have. We have not directly recruited for proper jobs in the HSE. The nurses, healthcare assistants and other healthcare workers who are most at threat from Covid-19 are getting little financially and, in some cases, nothing. Is the Government going to do something about this? Will it make sure these student nurses are paid and rewarded? Will it deal with the issue of proper recruitment to quality jobs for the front-line workers on whom we depend?

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