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

The Government seems to be getting itself into a mess over the issue of recognising the huge role workers played in sustaining our society during the Covid pandemic. I will give a few suggestions in that regard. First, health workers who were on the front line in hospitals fighting to keep the disease at bay and getting infected are a particular category whose work must be recognised, along with that of other people, including home carers and anybody in the health service who was directly confronting the health consequences. Beyond that, there are other groups not in the front line in that sense, such as retail workers, transport workers, teachers, local authority workers, civil servants, contact tracers and so on, who need recognition.

There is a more fundamental point, which is that during the pandemic we realised the key role played by many working people who suffer low pay and precarious work, and are generally not acknowledged, in sustaining us. In some cases, such as musicians, artists and so on, we really felt their absence because they could not work. That requires a more general response, rather than a once-off response, in terms of addressing low pay. We need to have something like a €15 living wage as a mandatory minimum wage, to do something serious about precarity in employment and to bring bank and statutory holidays, not on a once-off basis, up to the levels we have in Europe. They are much lower here. There needs to be a general recognition that before the pandemic, we failed to fully recognise how important many categories of workers are. If we are to learn the lesson of the pandemic and have a better future, we need to make those changes.

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