Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

Workers want to live; they do not just want to exist and to live to work. They deserve not just decent wages, but also a proper work-life balance. In recent years we have seen big corporations trying to squeeze every last drop of energy and productivity out of their workforces, expecting them to be always on and always available. Instead of freeing people up to live their lives, new technologies are being used tighten the screws, to increase the control of the employer, to decrease the autonomy of workers and to chip away at workers' personal time. That has to stop.

Workers deserve a right to disconnect, to clock off and to leave their work at work. The unions have been fighting for this, and in other countries the right to disconnect has been won. However, the Irish bosses and their representatives in government have opposed such a right for any workers. Corporate lobbyist IBEC argued during the election that, "any legislative intervention on working time is likely to bring unhelpful rigidity to an increasingly flexible world of work." Of course, the bosses view any rights for workers or regulation on businesses as unhelpful rigidity. In their books, they miss the flexible world of work that existed 100 years ago, where workers had no rights, where they were picked off the docks by corporations and the corporations controlled their lives. Unfortunately, we know that when corporate lobbyists tell the Government to jump, they are asked, "How high?" To fight against it, we need a legal right for workers to disconnect, as proposed here today, but more, we need strong and fighting trade unions, and a left government with socialist policies willing to take on the corporations.

Workers' rights must also be put front and centre in the discussion around working from home. With Covid, we have seen many businesses that could and should allow employees to work from home, refusing to do so, instead insisting on their workers putting their health at risk by travelling into the office. Other companies are telling people to work from home, but are not providing the necessary supports for their workers to do that. Working from home means extra costs: desks, chairs, equipment, and let us not forget, light and heating bills. Instead of the company paying to heat the office, the worker pays to heat their own home. Keeping the lights on and the radiators warm all day adds hundreds of euro more to the cost of living, and too often that is falling on the shoulders of workers. Instead, bosses must be made to cover that cost. The €3.20 per day work from home payment will be welcome and should be mandatory for employers to pay, but even that will not cover the full cost, as it based on 10% of the cost of home bills, but if one is working from home for 40 hours or more per week, it is much more than 10%. It is time to protect workers and workers' rights, not just now during Covid, but in the long run, too. Proper supports for those working from home will be an important first step towards this.

Finally, I have a general point. The Covid crisis is likely to have massive long-term impacts on how people work and want to work. An idea whose time has come is that of moving to a four-day week, or a 30-hour week, without loss of pay. We have seen a massive increase in the productivity of workers, but wages have stagnated over recent decades while working hours have been increased. In other words, the surplus is being hoovered up by the bosses. It is time for workers to demand a shorter working week without loss of pay. A move to a four-day week would not just improve people's living standards and their work-life balance, but it would also have major environmental benefits in reducing emissions.

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