Mark Dearey (Green Party)

I welcome the Minister of State. I welcome the opportunity to speak on this topic ahead of the consultation process. Speaking as an employer, I highlight the precious nature of a job and the importance of the relationship between the employer and employee. In my case, my relationship with staff is binary, as was the case with Senator Quinn. I thank Senator Quinn for his story, which he told movingly. The relationship with agency workers is triangular, involving contracts between the agency and the worker and between the agency and the employer. This set of relationships is more complex and the likelihood of things going wrong and the room for exploitation is greater. This can exist in binary relationships, which is why we have partnership and unions, and can also exist with these triangular relationships. That is why this legislation is overdue.

Perhaps the Minister of State is aware of an article by Father Brendan McPartlin, SJ, in Working Notes. He talks about the history of the directive, which Britain has long opposed for competition reasons. Ireland could not afford to lose competitiveness with regard to Britain and joined for the purposes of tracking the UK. This opposition continued until 2008. I understand Ireland felt compelled to take this position but I am glad both countries have moved on. It is important that when capital seeks flexibility and competitiveness, which it does in this instance, not in regard to materials or utilities but in respect of human beings, those who are the subject of the search for flexibility and competitiveness are protected and not subject to exploitation. This can easily happen through business pressure, increased competition in the sector and huge numbers of immigrants coming into a country. There are also reasons and mechanisms through which agency workers can become the subject of exploitation. I am not sure it is good for business.

Recently, I spoke in the House about the minimum wage and how we could create a bridge between jobseekers and the workplace, without allowing the minimum wage to become a barrier to employment. I got my head taken off on Facebook for making the suggestion that the State should help young people on €100 a week to bridge the gap between jobseeker's benefits and employment. I suggested a contribution of €7 from the employer and €165 from the State. This would reduce the State's involvement in sustaining a person by €50 a week on the basis of a 35-hour week. This would move the person into employment where he or she would be subject to levies. This could help employers to stop the current practice of sub-optimal service, where one makes the customer wait because the business is selling cheaper goods or fewer goods but it takes as long to sell them as to sell expensive goods. We are in this fluid situation and we are in a recession, although technically we came out of it some time ago. There is no question that employers are under enormous pressure to see flexibility and competitiveness yet I still resist it because I do not believe agency work is good for an employing organisation. I am pleased to see the figure is 2%. At the margins, there is a role for agencies to fill spikes in demand and to take care of peripheral activity within a company. In the case of the HSE, where agency workers have become common, my understanding from the nursing unions is that it is a far more expensive way of doing business than the traditional binary relationship of employer and employee. The core strength of my small business is the staff, the relationship I have with them and the relationship they in turn have with customers. I wonder how sustainable it would be if I were to embark on the practice of using an agency to supply staff.

Ironically, I understand that in a number of European countries agency work was used initially as a tool to bring not easily employed people into the labour market. It was conceived in some countries to have a social benefit attached to it. However, it morphed into something else. There was a cynical use of it in the Gamma case. Gamma Industry acted as the agency while Gamma Construction delivered the work. Two arms of the same corporation did not enter into the kind of healthy relationship I spoke about but an exploitative one where temporary staff in Ennis in particular were being paid €3 a week. Their rights were not explained in Turkish, which was the only language they understood. They had to have their meals separate from the rest of the staff.

Because our employment rights legislation does not allow comparison between agency workers and permanent workers but only between agency workers and other agency workers to establish whether they are being treated equally played against those Gamma workers at the time. It is a problem in that in the 1998 Act comparisons are not allowed between agency staff and full-time staff doing the same job but must be between agency workers. That is my understanding of the legislation. The Minister of State, Deputy Calleary, is looking at me in a way that suggests I could be wrong. I accept I may be wrong but that is my understanding of the provision in the Act.

I welcome the public consultation and the eventual adaptation in December next year of the directive. I also welcome the fact that local conditions are being taken into account and that it allows social partnership to deal with the finer detail of how implementation will happen in this country. That makes sense because we are in a diverse Union with a wide range of economies. I also note that the directive begins by quoting the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and that this directive finds its wellspring in the charter.

I cannot help but finish with a barb against those who claimed that the Lisbon treaty would wreck workers rights when in fact the formal enshrining of that charter happened as a result of the Lisbon treaty and that it is the wellspring for the directive. The European social democratic approach to labour and to this directive is progressive while the more aggressive, dare I say Anglo-Saxon model that characterises some relationships between employers and employees, which does create a race to the bottom, is not progressive. By allowing for a consultation period and ultimately transposing the directive itself into Irish law we are embracing the more progressive model. It is important that it is done carefully and that local knowledge plays a part. Ultimately, these triangular relationships need strong legislation because of the range of problems that can exist as to who employs whom, who is responsible for whom and that can only be dealt with by clear and effective legislation.