Margaret Cox (Fianna Fail)

I apologise to the Minister of State, as it was my intention to speak during the Second Stage debate and on Committee Stage today. Unfortunately, I was delayed coming to the House. I wanted to make some specific comments with general application that the Minister of State might consider before Report Stage. It might be valuable to introduce some amendments to deal with the issues. I know there were debates in both the Dáil and the Seanad regarding the particular status and treatment of temporary agency workers. I run a recruitment agency and have a particular knowledge of how agency workers work and how the temporary work agency business operates. I welcome the inclusion of this issue in the legislation as well as the protection given to those working on temporary assignments.

I also thank the Minister of State and his Department for having listened to the various positions put forward by the National Recruitment Federation pertaining to this issue. However, I have a concern. It is in the nature of the temporary worker business that a call might come at 8.30 a.m. from a client organisation which needs someone to start work on site and in situ at 9 a.m. The assignment may only be for one hour to three hours to cover an immediate requirement. I am not referring to longer assignments of one or two weeks or three or four days but to the particular case of a very short-term assignment lasting from an hour up to one full day.

The documentation requirements appear to be too onerous as far as the transactions between both the employer and the agency and the agency and the temporary employee are concerned. Perhaps we need to examine this issue to ensure we do not enact something that will be ignored, although I do not know how to frame it. If the legislation is ignored in the extremely short-term cases of one hour up to one day, it will also be ignored in the greater scheme of things, which would defeat the purpose of this important legislation which contains important protections for this sort of worker.

Perhaps the Minister of State will take cognisance of this issue. Previously, the House has discussed how legislation that we perceived to be protecting agency workers was put in place and it actually worked against agency workers because the protection level was too great for someone to bother with it, particularly when it came to women, pregnancy and similar matters. Such workers might actually feel discriminated against by virtue of the protection we are trying to enact.

I ask the Minister of State to consider the issue and I apologise again for not raising it during the Second Stage debate and for not being here for the debate on the relevant section on Committee Stage. Quite often, an agency might fill four or five bookings of this kind of short-term, immediate requirements in one day. This needs some sort of consideration.