Ivana Bacik (Dublin Bay South, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I commend my colleagues Deputies Nash and Duncan Smith on proposing this important motion. I am proud to speak in support of it. I also pay tribute to our colleague Senator Sherlock, who has done so much to enshrine a right to flexible working in law. I acknowledge how fortunate we all are to be able to stand here in a peaceful parliament debating this issue while bombs are raining down on the people of Ukraine. We stand in solidarity with them at their darkest hour.

As Deputy Howlin says, Covid has changed the nature of work for all of us in Ireland and we have seen a new way of working emerge. Pre-pandemic, many of us took for granted a form of work that emphasised presenteeism: the jacket on the back of the chair and the fact that people were expected to be in the office at all hours. That was accompanied by the awful daily ritual of the lengthy early-morning commute for so many, which was unpaid and was time taken out of people's lives and family time. The pandemic has offered us a great opportunity to reset priorities, to enshrine in law the right to flexible working that will benefit all of us: men and women, individuals, families and local communities.

I wish to emphasise the importance that a genuine right to flexible work would have for women.

Speaking on the morning after International Women's Day, we can all acknowledge that women in particular will stand to gain from a genuine right to flexible work. The Central Bank has noted that women's participation in the Irish labour force has increased by 3.5 percentage points since the pandemic began. While it is true to say that during the pandemic many women continued to bear the lion's share of caring responsibilities and unpaid domestic responsibilities in the home, it is also the case that the opportunity to engage in hybrid working or remote working enabled more women to participate in the workforce. Indeed, enabling men to work from home also enabled men to take up more responsibilities as fathers and as carers. This could have great feminist benefits too, not just for women but also for men.

We are all conscious of the benefit for the environment that a genuine right to flexible work can afford us. We saw a reduction in carbon emissions during the lockdowns. Many of us in Dublin city constituencies heard for the first time the clarity of birdsong on the street. While climate action of course requires a deal more than a right to remote working, genuinely more people being enabled to work from home will mean less traffic, fewer polluting cars on our roads and better air quality for all of us. At a time of serious concerns about energy security, it will also reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.

As Deputy Duncan Smith has outlined, the growth of local communities was greatly strengthened and enabled during Covid-19. Quality of life improved for many people who were able to move out of city centre locations and work from home in areas where perhaps they were closer to family and to their original local communities. All of these benefits are clear from a genuine right to remote work, as we are proposing in this motion and in our legislation that Senator Sherlock has drafted. Unfortunately, the Government's Bill, rather than providing for a right to request remote work, is more effectively a right to refuse for employers. As Deputy Nash has said, it is a toothless and anaemic Bill. The right to refuse effectively undermines and countermands that right to request which it is apparently supposed to provide.

The Government has failed to include within the draft Bill a presumption that if work that has been done remotely during the pandemic, it is reasonably practical to expect it to continue to be done remotely or at least to give employees and workers the option to work remotely and to work in a hybrid fashion. We know that the majority of people in Ireland wish to see this right to remote work and a more hybrid model of work enshrined into law and embedded in our policy going into the future. It should not just be seen as something that was unique to the pandemic. It should be seen as something that we can provide for permanently.

The Labour Party has a long record in working for workers' rights. Our working from home Bill in 2020 would have given workers a statutory right to switch off. That again must be taken along with the right to remote working. We have also pushed for a Donogh O'Malley moment in childcare to ensure a universal public scheme of childcare. That too must accompany a genuine package of measures to enable more women to take part in the workforce and in public life, and to enable all workers to have a better quality of life. This will benefit all of us: workers, families and communities. I urge the Minister of State to accept the motion.

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