David Cullinane (Sinn Fein)

The Minister is welcome. In giving the Bill a cautious and qualified welcome I will express some of my concerns about some of its aspects. I have also been inundated with opinions from organisations and individuals on the Bill. Senator Terry Leyden mentioned IBEC, to which I will return, but I have also received representations from trade unions and people who were agency workers and exploited in the past. They suffered exploitation because of the lack of protection for such workers because agency workers were not on a par with other workers in the State. I was among those who supported the campaigns conducted by SIPTU and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to ensure the provision of proper safeguards for workers.

I genuinely believe workers should be treated equally and that the State has a responsibility to ensure employment rights for them. It has a responsibility to put safeguards in place and ensure workers are not exploited. This is a core, fundamental aspect of the work of any Minister. It is fair to state the Minister may have preferred a derogation, as may have others in his party. Moreover, as he stated to Senator Terry Leyden, the directive was not negotiated in his day. I accept that had he then been in office, it would not have been. He is, therefore, bringing forward this legislation begrudgingly, which I welcome, in so far as it goes.

As for the position adopted by IBEC to which Senator Terry Leyden referred, I also received the correspondence. When I encounter employers' organisations using phrases such as "competitive disadvantage" as reasons not to put safeguards and rights in place for workers, I wonder from where they are coming. This appears to stem from a desire to maximise profits and the interests of business and employers, not a wish to have due regard for the interests of workers. It beggars belief that such organisations do not accept that those who work for a living should have proper and equal rights.

A clear gap appears in the Bill with regard to a category of agency workers who are identified as permanent agency workers. As the Minister mentioned, the legislation provides for what is known as the Swedish derogation which excludes from equal pay entitlements those agency staff retained on half pay by an agency between assignments. Section 7(2) reads, "Subsection (1) shall not, in so far ... as it relates to pay, apply to an agency worker employed by an employment agency under a permanent contract of employment", after which the provision outlines the relevance to an agency worker or workers. I read through the Minister's speeches in the Dáil, as well as the transcripts of some extracts, and he stated in the Dáil that the Bill represented an important step forward for agency workers by guaranteeing equal treatment in pay and basic working conditions with directly recruited workers, unless, of course, one happens to be one of the aforementioned permanent agency workers, which is part of the problem. I cannot help but wonder why the Government is excluding such workers and what is the motivation in this regard. I consider the maintenance of this loophole to be a cynical action that panders to some of those I mentioned previously who seek to undermine workers' rights and drive down wages for the low-paid. The Government appears happy to allow for the loophole and perhaps even to benefit from it. I am aware that my colleague, Deputy Peadar Tóibín, has queried the number of agency workers being employed by the State. All Members have experience in their constituencies of agency workers being employed in the health service, local authorities and right across the board. The HSE spent €48.6 million on agency staff in the first quarter of 2011, which is more than was spent in the previous year. Moreover, in excess of €14.5 million was spent on agency doctors, €21 million on agency nurses and a further €13 million an agency care services. It is evident that many people are employed by the State as agency workers and that if they are permanent, I hope they will be perceived to be on a par with any other worker in the State.

I also note this category of worker is excluded from entitlements such as sick pay, occupational pension schemes, benefits-in-kind, financial participation payments and bonus payments and ask the Minister to include them. In addition, how many workers with equal length of service and doing the same job with approximately the same skills have different sick pay entitlements? I revert to the fundamental principle I hold, that all workers should be treated equally.

There appears to be a drift or move towards employing agency staff. Some of the profits then go to the agencies and the workers who often are low paid are the victims of exploitation in which regard there is a responsibility on the State. As I stated, one of the Government's primary responsibilities is to protect the rights of citizens and workers. In this context, a number of Members mentioned the United Kingdom. I would prefer to see in place a harmonised system in which there was movement towards a position where the rights of agency workers were also safeguarded in the United Kingdom, rather than one in which people here used what was happening there as justification for not doing the right thing.

While I reserve the right to table a number of amendments to deal with some of the concerns I have raised, I offer a cautious and guarded welcome to some of what the Minister is attempting to do. Nevertheless, I have concerns about some of the exemptions to which I have referred.