Ruairi Ó Murchú (Louth, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputy Joan Collins for introducing this sensible legislation. Deputy Ó Laoghaire put it perfectly in explaining how easy it was for him to pay his union subscriptions. We have all read the history books and we all know the story of what happened in 1913. We know how bad things would be if we did not have the power of unions and collective bargaining. We are talking about making something that is very simple much easier and making it somewhat more difficult for bad employers to engage in what could be described as union busting. The Government's proposal to kick the can down the road does not make any sense. This proposal is straightforward.

I have spoken to the Minister of State and other Ministers in his Department about the issue of PayPal. I have spoken to a number of workers who have suddenly become representatives of other workers. They are very worried about whether they are covered from the point of view of knowing the ins and outs because there is not a unionised workforce in the company. While I hope the outworking of that will be a good package for the people affected and I hope the number of redundancies will be lower than what has been mentioned in the public domain, it would be much easier if these representatives were not just people coming from the general workforce but included someone with a union background, even if just to make these sorts of proposals.

I wish to raise an issue which I hope the Minister of State will be able to address to some degree. I have engaged with a number of workers in the building sector. Many of them are paid through the relevant contracts tax, RCT, system and are subcontractors. Often when major projects, including State projects, go through procurement, a worker can end up being the fourth level of subcontractor. In some cases, these workers also employ people directly. They had no intention of becoming a subcontractor but were forced into that set of circumstances. This has created anomalies whereby sometimes there is a race to the bottom. That needs to be dealt with. I have engaged with these workers and there is also ongoing engagement with Deputy O'Reilly's office. It is an issue we will be chasing up to a greater degree. A considerable amount of work has been done but there has been an absence of action by Government.

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