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

Like Deputy Nash, I too would like to express solidarity with the workers in Tara Mines who must be shocked at the sudden announcement. It is essential that every support is put in place in the first instance but very little will soften the blow of the announcement that they have had in the past 24 hours.

I thank People Before Profit, PBP, for bringing forward this Bill. If there is a time to make this change, it is now. We have almost full employment and we have an historically low rate of unemployment. Indeed, employers are struggling to get workers and, as has already been said, not every employer will take advantage of young workers paying them the lower rate in terms of the minimum wage.

The price of a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk does not matter depending on one's age. Whatever one has, it only stretches the same way.

There is a presumption - it is almost a middle-class notion - that this is pocket money for young people. I certainly have come across young people where this is critical for them, individually or as a contribution to the family income, in keeping the show on the road.

I have a particular affinity with equal pay for equal work because I was sitting in an office one day and I got equal pay for doing the same amount of work as the person who was sitting next to me. That was in the early 1970s. The Minister of State has no idea how corrosive it is to sit there watching somebody being paid more and doing exactly the same job as he is doing. That is their experience. Their first experience in the workforce is this experience of being discriminated against and the Minister of State has no idea of the campaign that was waged against equal pay for equal work when it came to paying women equal pay. In fact, the Minister of State could look now and say that our economy has benefited hugely from having a larger number of women in the workforce which would not have happened if we had kept that discrimination.

It is utterly corrosive. It is not just about how far a person's money will stretch. There is an emotional feeling to being discriminated against that stays with a person, and that should be factored into this.

There are all sorts of arguments. I recall the letters pages in the newspapers and the editorials around that time. Everything was going to collapse because women were going to get equal pay, and there is a similar sense of scaremongering to this. If somebody is doing the same work, there is absolutely no reason they should not be paid the same. Indeed, why should good employers be undercut by those who will take advantage by rotating workers to get in younger workers and undercut other employers by doing that repeatedly, which can happen? The argument that young workers will drop out of education does not hold water, as has been proven to be the case, and the current circumstances, where there is full employment, are the perfect time to carry out an analysis of that. It is discriminatory and unnecessarily punitive to treat people differently based solely on their age.

Young workers continue to be exploited, running the risk of being let go when the time comes for their employer to increase their wage, only for the employer to hire someone younger. That is something we should highlight. There is no doubt that in the case of some employers, that happens. We keep being told how well the country is doing, but other jurisdictions do not rely on this kind of discrimination. We should look to our European counterparts. The then European Economic Community, EEC, as it was known when we joined the now EU, was pivotal in making that change to equal pay for equal work for women. We should look at the signals that are coming from exactly the same location in respect of the discrimination occurring against young workers. If we look at how young people are treated in general in this country, it applies to everything from being locked out of homeownership, although that does not really apply to very young people, to having to suffer the pension timebomb in the years to come, yet they are being discriminated against or adversely affected at every turn.

I do not think there is any argument to continue this. Not only should there be equality in respect of the minimum wage, but we should move towards a living wage. We are creeping slowly towards that, but within that context, there cannot be a differential dependent on age. The idea that somebody who is older by mere months is paid a different sum highlights the issue. Students, for example, are really struggling to put a roof over their heads during college and often have to work. They can then be doubly discriminated against by virtue of the fact that if they get a job and happen to be under 20, they can be paid lower, as often happens. There is no argument for it. I ask the Minister of State to consider how beneficial it was for women to get equal pay in the context of their contribution to the workforce. This is about more than economics; it is about forming a view of what the world of work is like. Starting that journey with an experience of being treated less favourably than someone who happens to be, say, a year older than you just does not stand up.

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