Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time. I thank the Deputies for introducing this legislation and providing the opportunity to have the discussion. Before I get into the substantive issue of the right to disconnect and the need to protect home workers, I must point out that for workers, the best defence against exploitation is to join a union and vote left. That was true in the 1940s, when my grandmother was a shop steward with the Irish Women Workers Union; in the 1950s, when my grandad was a shop steward with the Irish Transport and General Workers Union; and in the 1960s and 1970s, when my dad was organising with the National Bus and Rail Union. It was true when I was a shop steward and it remains true today. That does not mean we shirk our responsibility as legislators - it means that the best defence that working people have against exploitation, and the best chance they have of decent work, is to vote left. I refer not just to joining their trade unions but also to getting active in them, which is very important.

I will now address the issues raised by the legislation. Covid-19 has turned people's lives upside down. That is an established and unassailable fact for many workers, who may have been seeking for years the right to work from home and may have been engaging with their employers. As a former trade union official, I engaged with employers to seek remote working for workers, or a version of blended working, but it was resisted by employers. They felt that it would not work or that they would not get the same level of productivity out of a worker if he or she was off site. Overnight, people moved out of offices and had to work from home. That had a number of effects, one of which - I would say this, would I not? - was that it proved I was correct when I advocated for workers to be able to work from home, because productivity increased. We saw that an attempt at a work-life balance for workers was much easier to achieve.

Another effect of the move to home working was that it exposed the conditions that many people live in. It is all very well for the Deputies to say somebody should have the right to a desk, but if he or she lives in an overcrowded apartment, where will he or she put the desk? The policies of successive Governments mean that generations of one family live in one house. This presents an opportunity to reimagine work but also to examine the lived reality. One of the Deputies mentioned "the lived reality". For many, the lived reality is a trial because they just do not have the space, the facilities or perhaps the peace and quiet due to the presence of multiple generations in one home. We need to examine that and how workers can be supported.

The Tánaiste will be aware, because we have engaged on this on a number of occasions, that I think we need to consider providing remote hubs for people, not in industrial estates but in the main street, where people can avail of facilities such as broadband, which many people do not have at home, so that they can work remotely. It is not only about working from home; it is also about not commuting and the capacity to be able to work remotely. The Tánaiste does not disagree with me on this and I look forward to having a broader engagement with him and his Department about these hubs. They will form a vital part of the issue. Nobody wants to spend hours upon hours commuting. Covid-19 has shown that workers are productive, that the boss can get what he or she needs and that we can avoid the commute. To do that, however, we need to recognise that for many people, working from home is not an option. We know well that the rules on the minimum space allowed for an apartment were changed. Many people, therefore, live in tiny spaces. Where will they put their desks and how will they manage to work from home? They need to be accommodated.

I might just mention legislation I will publish later in respect of the carry-over of annual leave. Similar legislation was brought in by the British Government. The UK Organisation of Working Time Act is more or less the same as ours. It was brought in because it was deemed necessary and I believe it is necessary here. One thing we have learned because of the pandemic is what an essential worker really is. When I was growing up, if someone had asked me what an essential worker was, I probably would have said a nurse, a garda or somebody such as a firefighter or someone perceived to be on the front line in that way. The pandemic showed us, however, that supply chain workers, cleaners and people in retail are also essential workers and many of them have been working considerably more than their contracted hours. They have annual leave they may not be able to take because the pandemic has not gone and we still need them.

I hope that other parties will support our legislation when it is tabled because it is important to be able to carry forward annual leave if the person has not been able to take it in this leave year. While many employers might facilitate that, many will not. I do not think anybody in the House would like to think of people storing up annual leave simply because they cannot take time off, as essential workers, and are not able to get the benefit of the leave. The benefit of the leave is the time off, not necessarily the money in exchange for the leave. Many people will want the time, which is worth a great deal more to them. One thing the pandemic has exposed is the nature of essential work. Essential workers are not just the people who, traditionally, we would have assumed were essential workers. They are, in fact, the people doing the cleaning, the people in supply chains, the people in retail and all the others who kept us going during the pandemic.

The issue of remote working and the right to disconnect is one the Tánaiste and I have discussed previously. I acknowledge the work done by the Financial Services Union, the Communication Workers Union, SIPTU, Fórsa and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. There is no reason to delay. They have been working away on this and have the facts, the figures and the statistics. They can point to international examples and they know how easily it can be done, but they also know how important it is that it is done. If a worker cannot switch off and does not have the right to do so, he or she will be always in work. That will take a toll while the person tries to do everything else that he or she has to do. Workers need the right to switch off, to turn off their devices and to know there will be no comeback. A couple of wits responded to me on Twitter by saying workers could just switch off their phones.

It is all very well to say that, but without the right to do that there can be consequences.

It is important that we are having this debate. I welcome the Deputies tabling the legislation and I look forward to working with them to get it through the House because it is an extremely important tool that workers need.

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