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

I thank the Leas-Cheann Comhairle. The Taoiseach is welcome back from COP27. Yesterday, I welcomed that he was attending COP27 and that the Government was represented there by him. I called for more urgent action here at home to tackle the climate catastrophe. I think it has been promised that we will have a debate on COP27 in the next week or so. I look forward to hearing more about that then.

I turn to the plight of the 3,000 people in Ireland, many of whom live and work in my constituency, who are employed by Facebook or its parent company, Meta, and currently do not know whether they will be in a job in a few weeks' time. We heard this morning from Facebook that it plans to make 13% of its global workforce redundant. That could mean as many as 390 people being made redundant here. That is a devastating prospect for so many people. It does not just apply to those employed by Facebook because this news follows a spate of lay-offs. There have been announcements from Twitter and Stripe. From news today, we know Zendesk is considering downsizing and Intel is considering job cuts.

There are many thousands of people employed by tech and related companies in Ireland. Not all will be directly affected but many are in fear as they face this appalling prospect of losing their job. In a grim irony, many are discovering their fate in real time through a drip-feed of coverage on the same social media sites that are now threatening to take away their livelihoods. The news about job losses was broken to many Twitter employees when they were suddenly locked out of their email accounts in their workplaces. That is no way to treat humans. It is no way to show any sort of dignity and respect to those who are highly skilled, highly qualified and working in what we might call high-value sectors. However, we know job losses in high-value sectors can also have knock-on effects on low-paid sectors. In Ireland, we have seen chronic conditions for low-paid workers over many years and many of those working in these sectors will also fear the knock-on effect.

I am asking that the Taoiseach and his Government call for much stronger rights for workers. We need to ensure, for example, that we see collective bargaining as a right and collective bargaining in the workplace because many of these tech companies are stridently anti-union. The workers are not organised within the workplaces in these high-value sectors. The lack of representation and collective solidarity may well have an impact now on the sort of redundancy packages we are going to see offered. We also need to see leadership from the Government on improvements to collective redundancy legislation in the event of liquidation. Clearly, that is not the issue today with the tech companies but it is a scenario that devastatingly arose for Debenhams workers two and a half years ago. We still have not seen delivery of the promise to improve collective redundancy rights in the event of liquidation. Will the Taoiseach guarantee strengthened collective bargaining and workers' rights in the face of these lay-offs and projected lay-offs?

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