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

I move amendment No. 1:

To insert the following after "real cost of living": "— produce a roadmap to deliver a living wage within a strict timeframe.".

I am sharing time with colleagues. I thank the Deputies who brought this motion to the floor of the Dáil this morning. It is very important. Before I address the substance of the motion, I want to make clear that the best defence a worker has against the right-wing policies of this Government is not just to join a trade union but to be active in that trade union and to demand his or her fair share of the profits this Government is so accommodating of employers to make.

I have come here from a meeting of the Joint Committee on Enterprise, Trade and Employment, which is debating the Government's remote working legislation. It sets out 13 reasons an employer may refuse a worker the right to work from home. The Tánaiste has stated he is bringing forward five pieces of workers' rights legislation. I am not sure if he has read all of that legislation or if he understands the import, but they most definitely are not workers' rights when codified within the law are 13 reasons - 13 spurious reasons - an employer may refuse a worker the right to work from home or remotely. We all know the benefits of that. The Government has spoken about that, but when push comes to shove we know whose side it is on. It is invariably on the side of employers. It is never on the side of workers.

At the commencement of the pandemic, the Minister of State, Deputy Browne, like me, will have seen the low-pay, precarious work that was being exposed. Hundreds of thousands of people were working in appalling conditions and many of them had been laid off. When we looked at the impact on the tax take, we found these workers were underemployed and underpaid. Such workers are in precarious work and some of them have no hope of meeting the cost of rent and certainly no hope of buying a house to shore them up against the damage being done by this Government to the property and housing markets.

The Minister of State said in his remarks that the Government is seeking to avoid a wage spiral.

Imagine that. Imagine wages just got out of control and people could live on what they were earning like we do in this House. Imagine workers could simply live on the wages they were earning. However, the Government's concern is about a wage spiral.

See this speech in context