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

I want to make it very clear that I also thank the Minister of State for being here. I do not want to give out to the person who did turn up about the people who did not. I thank him very much for being here.

I appreciate the explanation about industrial relations and how they work. I have some small knowledge of that myself. As matters stand, however, they cannot deal with this issue. The GDPR protections in place are not enough. This is happening at a frightening pace. The impact it is having on workers was outlined by the FSU in its report. It is incredibly demoralising for workers to think that their every movement is being watched because, at the end of the day, their output and productivity are what matters and there are ways of measuring those. The difficulty with this is that workers believe the surveillance is there, because the technology is all around them, but they do not know where this information is being stored or how it is being handled. They do not know either if it is going to be used against them in a situation where they might apply for a promotion or if they were involved in a disciplinary procedure.

I respect the Minister of State's point about this issue being included in collective agreements. It is important, and that can be done, but we have a shockingly low level of coverage with collective bargaining. It is going to increase at some point in the future but for the moment it is very low, which means these workers do not have the capacity to negotiate those collective agreements. Without that, we need the Government to step in and show leadership. It is very rare in a matter of industrial relations or workers' rights that I would ever cite the US as an example but I am doing so in this instance. The Biden Administration has called in workers and employers that use this type of software and it has begun an open and frank dialogue about where this is all going. It is the kind of dialogue we possibly should have had about social media back when the Minister of State and I were young but did not.

I think we need to grasp that opportunity now.

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