Joan Collins (Dublin South Central, Independents 4 Change) | Oireachtas source

I am disappointed that no Minister or Minister of State from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment is present. This is an important issue that has been going on for a long time. Bogus self-employment is an area in which I have a great deal of interest, and I was part of the social welfare committee's report into the matter. We now know that there is more bogus self-employment than we originally thought.

RTÉ commissioned Eversheds Sutherland to conduct an independent review to determine whether workers' employment status had been misclassified. This was startling at the time, given that it was the then Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection that should have investigated RTÉ, not an independent company. The Department of Social Protection started its investigation in 2020, two years after the Eversheds Sutherland investigation started. The Department is looking into 500 cases and the review is ongoing.

Yesterday, I received a number of emails from workers in RTÉ who were concerned about what was happening. I will go through one email to give the House some flavour. Its writer contacted me as part of a group of workers in RTÉ who were experiencing serious difficulties with their contracts and employment status. They are part of an ongoing bogus self-employment investigation being carried out by the Department, which follows the recent Eversheds Sutherland process. As part of the latter process, it has been determined that many of these workers were placed on incorrect contracts for many years, in some cases decades. As a result, they have missed out on multiple employment benefits enjoyed by colleagues who are fortunate enough to be employed correctly. Some of these benefits include, but are not limited to, holiday pay, sick pay, maternity leave and pensions.

Through the Eversheds Sutherland process, RTÉ has accepted these workers' start dates as being much earlier than their first employment contracts in 2019. However, while RTÉ is willing to accept the earlier employment start dates, the settlement offer that it has put forward in recognition of the workers being misclassified does not adequately reflect their lost entitlements or come close to being fair compensation. They are particularly concerned that their pension benefits have not been addressed, leaving many of them in the position of having worked for RTÉ for most of their working lives but without the staff pensions enjoyed by their peers. The National Union of Journalists, NUJ, has advised them that RTÉ will not enter into discussions on pension contributions because it would be unaffordable for the organisation. This comes at a time when RTÉ has been given extra money by the Government. It seems to these workers that RTÉ has acknowledged there was wrongdoing but does not want to admit liability. They are asking whether this is acceptable.

Yesterday, workers met SIPTU and the group of unions negotiating on their behalf. SIPTU's feedback was that RTÉ was not willing to move the acceptance date, given that it was asking the workers to vote tomorrow on accepting these conditions. It is bad form for an organisation like RTÉ to treat workers in this way. Workers should not be forced to vote tomorrow on something that is unclear, because if they vote on it, they will have to accept the outcome. Many will probably not vote at all because they do not want to be tied into an agreement to which they did not agree and that has not been finished as far as they are concerned. I wish to raise this issue today, given that tomorrow is the voting day.

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