Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the committee Chairman, Deputy Naughten, who agreed to share time with me this evening. I thank him also for taking on the job of putting this report together. Much of the preparatory work was undertaken in the Thirty-second Dáil and would have been lost but for the decision made by Deputy Naughten to use our Covid time, when we could do little else, to bring together the work and form a report from it. I also acknowledge the huge work undertaken by Deputy Joan Collins, who has unfortunately stepped out of the Chamber, and policy adviser Jack Savage in putting it together. It was a good use of our committee time when there was little else we could have done.

I thank the committee for including recommendations on platform working. It is those two particular recommendations I wish to focus on. Platform working is something we inaccurately refer to as the gig economy. It is a real example of digital disruption of the way we organise our work patterns. We are struggling to define it, much less catch up with it in terms of legislation and employment rights. Eurofound, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions, gives the most plain-language definition I have found of it, namely, the "matching of supply and demand for paid labour through an online platform". Deliveroo is the example that springs most readily to mind for most people. It is an excellent example of what is more correctly called on-location platform-determined work. However, that is only one of five forms of platform work outlined in the Eurofound policy brief on the subject. We have seen this type of work explode over the course of the pandemic and it has become much more visible as well. I stress that it is not necessarily a bad thing. I have been engaging with many Deliveroo riders and the feedback is they do the work because it suits them to do it. They may be in education, have other jobs or commitments and they like the flexibility. However, they have concerns from the perspective of individual workers and I have broader concerns around employment rights and social protection aspects of this.

We are not alone in struggling to keep pace with the rate of change in these traditional categorisations of employer, employee and self-employed. The EU directive on transparent and predictable working conditions makes a stab at it and I know of no member state that has got it right in terms of adequately defining the relationship between what Eurofound calls the triangular relationship between platform, worker and client. Let us investigate this a little. Where does the responsibility for safety lie? If a rider's bike is defective, his or her brakes are not working properly or the e-bike does not conform to a correct specification, who is responsible? Where do we go if the rider has a collision with a pedestrian? If a rider is attacked - and there have been notable examples of this happening over the course of the pandemic - where does the duty of care lie? A recurring theme when talking to people engaging in platform work, not just of the type I describe but more broadly, is the algorithm. How does any given platform dole out the work and under what criteria? Are the criteria visible or invisible to the worker? What level of transparency is there? It is not always clear and obvious and questions can arise from that as well. If speed of delivery is one of the criteria, does that encourage or reward risk-taking or rule-breaking behaviour? Would you be tempted to run red lights if you got more delivery jobs? I acknowledge SIPTU has been doing very important work around trying to organise riders but the very nature of the work makes it difficult. The riders are working different hours. They are often of different nationalities and may not share a common language. The work is also inherently competitive in nature. Riders are competing against others for jobs and it kind of militates against collective bargaining. All this makes it hard for the workers to come together and advocate and we all know workers are stronger when they operate as a collective.

Beyond that is the wider lens of taxation and social protection. How and where is a platform worker's income being taxed? Probably more important for me is the question of how and where are the platforms' profits being taxed. This returns to the more general issues around bogus self-employment, PRSI, and the social protection benefits a worker could or should be entitled to in respect of their social insurance contributions. These are difficult and really complex issues to answer. As I said, we are not the only country to struggle. There is not an EU member state that has adequately answered these questions. However, it is going to become increasingly important as we see more and more digital disruption in the labour force.

Recommendation Nos. 9 and 10 relate to platform working. They also refer to the update of the code of practice for determining employment status. I have reviewed the update on it. It is section 9.4 of the revised code that deals with "Workers in the digital/gig economy". As I have already adverted to, that is actually inaccurate language. The section that deals with platform working runs to four paragraphs and refers back to the idea of there being a binary status whereby these workers can either be resolved into "employed" or "self-employed". Increasingly, we are seeing that is a grey area. I would like the Ministers of State to comment in their contributions on whether we are adequately dealing with it. If we are looking to put this code of practice on a statutory footing as Deputy Naughten suggested, are we going to be able to cope with platform working and the new challenges it brings? I refer not just to the visible type like Deliveroo but also the much less visible type of platform working, such as Clickworker, for example.

I thank the Ceann Comhairle for allowing this report to be debated. There are numerous committees in the Oireachtas producing good work and very good reports that are often left on a shelf or to wither on the vine. It is a very useful use of Dáil time to be able to draw out from the report some of the more important aspects and threads. I very much welcome the opportunity and look forward to the rest of the debate.

See this speech in context