Brian Stanley (Laois, Independent)

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this issue of workers' rights. Over the past 40 years, I have long been involved in campaigns, with workers and as a worker myself on many occasions, trying to get basic rights.

I broadly welcome the Bill. It makes the necessary changes to the insolvency payments scheme but it is coming late. I welcome that it will cater for the situation at present regarding wages, sick pay, holiday pay, minimum notice entitlements and pension contributions. While they are in the insolvency payments scheme, workers lose out where the employer does not deem itself to have ceased trading. Thousands of workers have lost out over the past 41 years in that regard, so this legislation is coming a bit late.

The time limit was mentioned. There is a request from the largest union in the State, SIPTU, that it be extended from two years to six years. I would support that.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the relevant EU directive had not been transposed properly to provide for a situation where the employer ceased trading but had not formally ceased business, and where it had not been declared bankrupt or gone into liquidation, leaving workers in an awful position. There are many examples of that.

On the timeline for moving this forward, the heads of the draft Bill were started in 2023. Last October, pre-legislative scrutiny was completed by the committee. I have read all of the information on the provisions of the Bill. I welcome the new process for the applicants to have the employer deemed insolvent where the employer ceases trading without going through the formal wind-up. They can claim under the insolvency payments scheme. The Bill also provides a time-limited application window to cover the historical cases impacted by the Supreme Court judgment, covering the period from 1983 up to whenever we enact the Bill. However, the employees only have two years to make the application. I would ask for that to be extended given that some employees who are affected by this are advanced in years now. Some of them may have emigrated, as mentioned by Deputy Healy.

I welcome the closing of a gap in the scheme to ensure that employees of former sole traders in insolvency arrangements as defined in the Personal Insolvency Act 2012 will now be covered by the scheme; the amending of the Employment Equality Act 1998 to ensure that any court awards for gender discrimination are covered by the scheme as well; and the updating of how the salary limit is applied to all payments.

I broadly welcome the Bill but there are some changes I will be looking for. It is important that we protect workers. Some progress has been made. I acknowledge any time there is progress made but we have had situations where many workers have lost out. It has typically been low-paid workers. The Debenhams case was a classic case where there were over 1,000 workers but there have been many lesser-known cases where people have lost their jobs. The employer did not formerly wind up the business and did not formally cease trading, and company loyalty - people having given decades of work and service to a company - seemed to count for nothing. In some cases, the employers magically spring up under another company name within a very short period of time and seem to be flying it again, which is always disappointing, whereas the workers, who have worked for maybe two, three or four decades with a company, are left high and dry.

There is more work to be done in terms of workers rights. We need to get to a living wage in this country. We have a minimum wage but we need to go further on that. The cost of living here is very high compared to other EU countries. Auto-enrolment in pension schemes is being delayed again. We have a large group of workers who are heading for pension age for whom the only pension entitlements will be the State pension. An increasing number of those workers will be in private rented accommodation. They will be in a real fix because private rented accommodation will be totally unaffordable for pensioners. I have already dealt with a couple of cases where pensioners were living in private rented accommodation and the State pension alone did not cover it. In one case I dealt with, the person had an employment pension and the State pension. That individual struggled, but managed to keep going until being housed by the local authority, but many employees and former employees will not have that. It is important that the pension scheme be advanced.

The Minister mentioned that a trade union official could make the case on behalf of the workers but the majority of workers in the private sector are not represented by a trade union. The percentage of workers in the private sector that are represented by a trade union is at an all-time low compared to the 1970s and 1980s. We need to look at why this is case. There are a number of reasons. The fact is that many employers, albeit not all of them, are making it difficult for workers to join a trade union. Workers are targeted when they try to join a trade union. Some of them wind up losing their jobs. They wind up being bullied out and targeted and all sorts of tricks are played on them to make life difficult for them. We also have the promotion of a mé féin culture in society generally that we can all do these things on our own, but we cannot. They only strength that workers have is in combination. There is no legal right to collective bargaining and no legal right to join a trade union. Here is another example of it. While the Minister says in the scheme that a trade union can get involved on behalf of the workers, the majority of workers will not be represented by a trade union. I hope that changes, but imagine if hauliers, for example, were told that they could not combine and make their case collectively, which they do and I recognise is their right to do, or if chambers of commerce members were told that they could not combine into a chamber of commerce and make their case to the local authority or Government. Imagine telling members of IBEC, ISME or any of them that they had to come to us individually and we would not talk to their representatives. There would be a huge hullabaloo in this House and everywhere else over it, including across the media.

I welcome the Bill and I broadly support it, but the issue of trade union membership, which is in the programme for Government this time round, needs to be advanced. Workers, particularly low-paid workers, are at the bottom rung of the ladder and the only protection they have is in combination. It is a basic right. We are lagging way behind the rest of Europe with this. We must give workers the right to be represented by a trade union. As for this thing in Irish law - an Irish solution - that you can join a trade union, it is very difficult to join a trade union in many places of employment or companies in the State. It is little use being in a union if you do not have a right to be represented by that union. In the private sector, we must change the dial that where there are more than ten workers in a company, they have a right to combine together to be represented. Many good employers do that, and that is fine, but we need to look for that to be an absolute right in law in the State. I urge the Minister and the Department to go further with this.

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