Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal West, Sinn Fein)

I was in Liberty Hall when Cleary's closed down. I remember the shock of the workers. They were completely shell shocked. In any man's language, we could call a tactical insolvency. The response of the Government through the Minister for labour at the time, Joan Burton, was to turn Liberty Hall into a dole office. She just gave the workers advice on how to access social welfare. She said there was nothing there for them and she certainly was not prepared to do anything for them. We see this again and again. There was Cleary's, Debenham's, TalkTalk, La Senza and the Paris Bakery. What is the one thing all of these had in common? It was mostly women workers on low pay. Apart from a small few examples, they were not unionised. They were left high and dry by their employers.

Some of them - the Debenham's workers are a very good example of this - were subject to a collective agreement. Anyone who has ever negotiated an agreement knows there is give and take. They got some enhanced payments for redundancy written into their collective agreement but we know that they also had to give. However, when it came to it, there was no protection for their collective agreement. Some of them had worked that agreement for years. It did place some onus on the employees and the workers to do certain things and in return there was the enhanced redundancy. I note that the Minister's script said that it would protect workers in the event of their employer's insolvency and cover certain pay and pension related entitlements that employees may be owed by their insolvent employer. That is really welcome, because there is nothing more unjust for a worker who is working hard and doing nothing wrong than when their employer becomes insolvent.

A suggestion I have is not perhaps for this legislation but could be considered for the future. The Government should be looking at protecting collective agreements because they are the backbone of a unionised workforce. In the next couple of months, we will see the transposition of the EU adequate minimum wage directive. That will tell a tale about where this Government stands. I do not want to spoil it for anyone but the Government rarely stands on the side of workers. The Minister knows that. The transposition of the directive will show this.

What workers need is the legal right to organise. They need those protections in their workplace. No worker would be foolish enough, certainly not anyone who saw what happened with Cleary's, Debenham's, TalkTalk, La Senza, the Paris Bakery and all of the others, to think that if they wait around long enough that a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil Government is going to on their side. What they need is the protection of their trade union. It gravely worries me when I hear from lobby groups and some in government that they do not think there will be a need for legislation arising out of this. There will be a need for very robust legislation in order to protect workers.

The truth is that until workers have a Government on their side, the right to organise will not be delivered. We know the Government not necessarily by what it says but its actions. There have been no increases to the sick pay, which were promised, and there is no commitment to a living wage, which has been pushed out again. There is yet another delay to auto-enrolment.

Workers know who is going to be on their side. They know who they can rely on when the pressure is on. I hope I am wrong on this but I believe the transposition of the EU directive will show the Government in very stark relief for what it really is, and that is not a Government that is prepared to stand with or stand up for workers but it is a Government that will always and forever be on the side of the bosses.

This Bill goes some way towards addressing the issues of insolvencies but we need to see action from the Government in relation to tactical insolvencies because those employers have big, deep pockets and access to a lot of legal advice and the workers are left bereft. We need to outlaw that.

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