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

Yes. The workers are on very low pay. Considering that the food we eat is one of the most basic things we need to sustain our society, it says something that pretty much everyone along the food chain, whether they are Irish, small farmers, migrant workers or the people who work in the shops, is pretty poorly paid. This Bill is part of trying to address that. If we are serious about some of the lessons we have learned, bearing in mind that everybody, including the Government, referred during Covid to the role of essential workers and their importance to society, what we are going to do will have to be tangible and meaningful.

The Minister of State will not be surprised to hear I am not happy with his response to our Bill. Is four weeks for personal illness or injury, or six months at 70% of what we are proposing, excessively generous? Does it represent an excessive burden on the employers? It is not, given the profits being generated by them. The profits are enormous, so I do not accept that the big beef barons, whom we have discovered sometimes hide their profits offshore in Luxembourg and elsewhere, could not afford to pay decent sick benefits to the workers who help to generate them.

In Germany, a worker receives 100% of his or her wage for the first six weeks. The Irish Government is proposing 70% of the salary, starting with three days and working up to ten at the height. We are so far behind the rest of Europe in these matters. The burden is not excessive in the other countries, including Germany, so why should it be regarded as excessive by employers here? I do not accept the Minister of State’s excuse, therefore.

Consider the question of whether, if you do not have a valid work permit, you should not be entitled to benefit from the social insurance fund or to have recourse to the WRC. We have cases on this. There are workers who had permits but who were mistreated when they stood up for themselves when they got into a dispute with their employer. The WRC found that they were mistreated and that had they had the entitlement, they would have received awards in compensation. They did not get them, however, because their permits had expired. Their employer wanted to make sure they did not get their additional permits because they were regarded as troublesome workers. That cannot be allowed. The workers had made reasonable efforts and previously had permits. They wanted to have permits but did not have them because they were in a dispute with their employer. In their case, the WRC found in their favour. Therefore, the Minister of State’s answer does not address the point.

The implication of what the Minister of State said is that if workers did not have permits, they could not have been paying PRSI and therefore would not have been entitled to benefit from the fund. Why would he assume that? Almost certainly they are paying PRSI, but they do not have the permits. They have made the effort to get them. They are paying PRSI in most cases or were paying it until their permits expired or their employer did not want their permits to be maintained.

The central demand of Migrant Rights Centre Ireland and others has been that employees should have the right to move from their employer and to have this spelt out explicitly. The Minister of State says the right is provided for but, in reality, it is extremely difficult for migrant workers attached to an employer to move from them. It needs to be stated explicitly in law that they have the right to do so. I appeal to the Government to reconsider its opposition to this Bill and let it progress. If it wants to make tweaks, let it make them on Committee Stage, but it should not block the Bill, which is intended to enhance the rights of migrant workers and all other workers.

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