Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The elephant in the room in the area of recruitment and retention of vital workers in the home care sector is pay, terms and conditions. It is that simple. Some of the best people I know work as healthcare assistants, HCAs, and healthcare support assistants, HCSAs. They are the best of people, but they are among the least valued by employers and the State. As the Minister of State knows only too well, they deliver vital services across every community to, by definition, the most vulnerable in society. Earlier this year, as was referred to earlier, we saw Ministers and the HSE perform what I would describe as a sleight of hand that was breathtaking in its arrogance. The floor for the hourly rate of pay for HCSAs employed in the private sector was increased to €13.10 per hour, packaged and branded as a living wage, but how was it paid for? It was paid for by sneakily cutting committed home support hours by 1.9 million hours. That is straight out of the Minister for Health's management consultancy for beginners handbook. There was no additional funding and no plan to index hourly wage rates as the living wage rate rises. The plan includes some provision for travel time but not for mileage and mileage is what matters, especially for home care support workers trying to keep a car on the road to enable them to service their clients and deliver a service to citizens in rural Ireland in particular.

We have a two-tier employment system. As Deputy Duncan Smith said, there are more than 18,000 home carers in the system. The 5,300 HCSAs who work for the HSE have the benefit of collective bargaining and recognition of their union, SIPTU, which has helped to make the sector work much better in recent years. Thanks to trade unions, a HCSA can start on an hourly salary of more than €16 and receive other basic entitlements such as pension provision. It is quite a jump from the €13.10 per hour offered as a floor by private sector employers. It is no wonder the ambition of many who work in the private sector is to get a job with the HSE. Why? They will get paid sick leave, sufficient contracted hours to allow them to plan and have a decent life and premium payments for unsociable hours; in other words, basic decency. That is what it is.

Until the Minister of State decides that this particular bull is to be taken by the horns, we will continue to have a crisis in care, a crisis in recruitment and retention and a failure to plan for the future. There is only one tried and tested way to ensure we address this comprehensively and permanently. A joint labour committee, JLC, for the sector is needed to bring trade unions and companies who are representative of the industry together under the aegis of the Labour Court to customise a solution on pay, terms and conditions for a sector that is growing by the day and is growing fat on State money. The sector now provides 60% of home care with few employment standards and conditions attached beyond the statutory legal minimum. There should not be any cash without conditions. The Minister for Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth used the JLC employment regulation order, ERO, system of decency the Labour Party revived to ensure better pay and conditions for skilled early years professionals as a condition of substantial State investment in private firms that deliver a crucial service. What is so different about the home support system? Why should it be treated differently?

Last year's report of the Strategic Workforce Advisory Group on Home Carers and Nursing Home Healthcare Assistants skirted around the issue. Recommendation 6 neatly says that all home care providers should be "invited" to pay a living wage. Recommendation 7 states: "An appropriate mechanism to reach agreement in the private and voluntary sector in respect of pay and pensions for home-support workers and healthcare assistants shall be investigated [investigated] and reported on by an Expert Working Group". Jesus wept, honestly.

It is called a joint labour committee. The approach is called sectoral bargaining. No one will be struck by lightning for uttering those words. The legislation is rock solid. Incredibly, the only recommendation made in the report published last year that has been implemented thus far is the one on employment permits for home support workers. That is the easy option. It is not the transformational one. The easy option is to revise the permit system and allow people to come to the country to work in the sector. That is not the permanent transformational process we have been calling for. The JLC system is the answer. It was the answer for the childcare sector. The answer is not another working group. It is blindingly obvious and all that is lacking is the political will. We need a JLC system. We need an ERO for decency for all workers in the sector, private and public.

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