Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

The introduction of a statutory sick pay scheme has been long asked for and is long overdue. Statutory sick pay schemes are well-established across Europe and there is a glaring lack of one in Ireland that has left generations of workers very vulnerable. We are one of the very few European economies that does not have mandatory sick pay entitlements. With few exceptions, workers in Ireland have no right to be paid by their employer if they fall sick. In the eyes of the law, sick pay is a perk that employers can decide to include in a contract if they feel charitable.

Good employers often look at retaining employees and it is part of a package of entitlements that come with the job. Around half of all workers receive some level of sick leave under their contracts but everyone else is left without any cover should they fall ill. Workers, mainly in non-unionised jobs in the private sector or if they are self-employed, are forced to continue working while they are sick to the detriment of their own health and that of their co-workers. Many people have said that already and that became very obvious during the pandemic. Their only other option is to turn to illness benefit which is completely inadequate and inaccessible. It is paid at €203 per week, before tax, to a full-time PAYE worker from the seventh day of illness. No payment is made for the first six days and to qualify workers need to have a minimum of two years PRSI contributions, which completely prevents younger workers from accessing payment.

To put this Bill in context, a worker on a minimum wage working an eight-hour shift will earn €84 a day. Statutory sick pay at 70% will give them €58.80 before tax. To get a single day of sick pay, they will have to get a certificate of incapacity from their GP which will cost them €60. For a minimum wage worker, a single day of sick leave will actually cost them money. These workers will not go to the doctor. They will either go to work sick or they will stay at home unpaid and their employer will not have to pay the €58.80 that some employers claim will cause them financial ruin.

If workers are sick for a longer period of time, they will get the 70% from their employer for a total of three days. They will then go on illness benefit which is equal to the grand sum of €29 per day. I do not believe any of us would even conceptualise living on that kind of an amount, having to pay rent, gas bills, for food and all the rest of it. Is that genuinely the proposal that has been put forward to this House as an accomplishment for workers' rights in Ireland as a new workers' right? The Government knows that the illness benefit is not up to scratch. The payment is too low and has worked to the detriment of workers’ health and that of their co-workers. Any person who works from cheque to cheque cannot afford to live on €203 a week. The Tánaiste admitted that during the height of the pandemic when it was very clear that a large number of workers could not afford to follow the public health advice if they were required to isolate. The enhanced illness benefit was introduced at €350 per week.

Statutory sick pay should be centred around some fundamental ideals, namely, that workers should not be out of pocket when they fall ill; when workers are unwell, they should have a right to recovery time; and when sick workers are given the means to stay at home, they protect other workers. It was not just Covid-19 as there are all sorts of things that we did not see during the pandemic, such as the traditional flu. We could see that it actually did matter that people stayed at home with coughs and sneezes.

There is an astounding lack of ambition in this plan. We need to be moving incrementally and to work towards an ambitious goal. The best outcome would be for employers to pay the full rate of pay for an initial short period, as is standard among our counterparts in Europe. In Germany and Austria, for example, a rate of 100% sick pay is paid for at least six weeks. In Luxembourg it is 13 weeks. France, Sweden and the Netherlands pay between 70% and 90% of wages for a number of weeks.

That early period of sick pay could be followed by a payment of tapered rates from the social security system, gradually declining over a period of two years but never lower than the unemployment payment rate. This dual system is common across Europe.

While the requirement to have a sickness certificate from a doctor is common practice in sick pay schemes throughout Europe, Ireland is unusual in that workers have to pay to see their GP. This does not seem to have been taken into account here at all, not to mention that at this current moment it is impossible for workers or people to get appointments with their GPs. Indeed, even getting on a GP list is problematic in some locations and in some parts of my constituency this issue crops up regularly. Most GP surgeries will not even taking appointments at the moment for non-urgent cases because so many healthcare staff in their offices are out sick with Covid-19. Do we really expect somebody with a stomach bug who is not sick enough to be required to attend their GP to be given an urgent appointment?

This Bill will have absolutely no impact on many responsible employers in Ireland who take a responsible approach to intermittent sick leave. Many employers from small to large organisations accommodate a period of between one to three days paid sick leave before requiring a doctor’s certificate. It is absolutely crucial that workers are given a certain number of cumulative uncertified sick days in recognition of the lack of a universal primary health care system that is, obviously, free at the point of delivery.

The coverage of sick pay is far lower in the private sector than it is in the public sector. Many employers in the private sector do have good sick pay arrangements. They recognise the need for it and their responsibility to treat their workers with dignity and respect. The arrangements they offer will exceed the minimum statutory requirements and they want to hold on to their staff. Similarly, many unionised workforces will have favourable sick pay arrangements which need to be protected and preserved. Others do not and it will be those employers who need to be targeted by this. These are employers who want to deny employees the right to sick pay and to make it as difficult as possible for them to avail of any employee benefits. In cases such as Deliveroo, for example, they go as far as to centre their business model around denying that their employees are employees at all, solely to avoid the responsibility for their well-being and their working conditions.

I would really challenge any employer who claims that they cannot cover the absence of a worker for three days over the course of 12 months to prove the financial impact of this on them when they have already factored in paying, for example, their wages, holiday pay and other aspects of what their entitlements might be. For intermittent days of absence, when a worker calls in sick in the morning with a bug, a cold, or whatever, how many employers will actually bring cover in? In many cases they will not. In some cases it will have to be the case because of the nature of the employment but in many instances it will not be the case.

I ask the Tánaiste why eligibility to this scheme is deferred for 13 weeks of employment. Any employee accrues annual leave and holiday entitlements from day one of an employment and by the time a worker qualifies for three days sick leave under this scheme they could probably have taken five days holidays and are probably likely to if they get sick.

What did the Department factor in when putting this scheme together? Does it expect workers to take their annual leave to cover them through those weeks if they fall ill? It is a real shortcoming of the scheme.

Thousands of Covid cases are being reported daily at a time when, coming out of the pandemic, many workers are looking for new jobs. Covid-19 does not care if you are in a new job, so why should this sick pay scheme? There has been that displacement in some of the more precarious sectors. People are less likely to take time off a new job. Employees do not tend to take annual leave for the first number of weeks or months of employment and, I think, are far less likely to call in sick during that time. They are often on hired a trial basis. I heard from one woman who has been three weeks in a job. A few people in her office tested positive last week. Luckily, she tested negative, but under this scheme she could have been one of those unlucky ones who had to go out sick. No one wants to get sick, certainly not in the first 13 weeks of a new employment. I do not understand why this benefit is deferred.

Under the Bill, sick leave will be paid at 70% of the employee's wage, but no definition is given for earnings that are taken into account. Could the Tánaiste qualify when he wraps up exactly how that is defined? That needs to be explicitly included in the Bill. What are the means to calculate an average day's pay for hourly paid workers who work irregular hours or workers who get paid on a commission basis, for example? Many sales reps, for example, get a base pay. Often it is about 50% of their earnings; sometimes it can be less. Commission makes up the rest. The practice in other European countries is to factor in actual earnings over a defined period. France, for example, pays sick leave as a percentage of average earnings over the three-month period prior to the absence. The calculation is done by social security and the payment is made from mandatory insurance carried by all employers.

While any progress on a statutory sick pay scheme is welcome, this Bill falls far short of what is needed. It reads like a get-out-of-jail card for the exact cohort of employers it is supposed to be aimed at. It will do very little to protect the workers it is supposed to protect. It is entirely lacking in ambition to bridge the gap in workers' rights between Ireland and our European neighbours. It is clear that the Bill was written not with the well-being of workers as the priority but, first and foremost, with the fear that people might take sick days to which they are not entitled. Constructing this scheme with that mindset has damaged completely the integrity of the intention behind the Bill. In its current form, the Bill fails to give any serious protection, especially for the first year of employment. It protects employers who claim financial difficulty but not their employees struggling to make ends meet, who must incur the expense of a GP visit, unlike so many of our European counterparts. One can be ill without requiring to go to the GP. That really needs to be considered in the context of the capacity of GPs across the country to provide urgent appointments to people who do not require those appointments but who are still sick.

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