Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will do my best to address the concerns expressed by Senator Zappone. The Low Pay Commission, almost by definition because of the sheer number and proportion of women existing on the national minimum wage, will have a particular focus in its work on how the minimum wage and low pay in general affect women. It is also worth noting that there is nothing in the Bill excluding the Low Pay Commission from focusing a particular piece of work at some stage, in terms of its remit, on the issue of pay and gender. That may very well be a piece of work that could, and should, be considered by the Low Pay Commission early in its lifetime.

I am not saying that quality jobs do not matter for the Low Pay Commission, because they do. I do not think anybody should take the view that will not be the case. In this country there is an over-reliance among those on low pay accessing family income supplement, which is a form of corporate welfare. Many people who depend on it work for extremely profitable international corporations. We need to make sure that we have an in work benefit system to assist people in difficult situations, but that should not become the norm and a system on which people are permanently reliant because work should always pay. A range of different principles feed into that.

When we refer to quality work, we cannot deal with the Low Pay Commission in isolation. We need to consider the suite of measures we are seeking to introduce to make sure we can level the playing pitch between employers and employees and continue to create sustainable and decent jobs that pay well. The evidence suggests, when we first started to emerge from the economic crisis and jobs were added to the economy in 2012, a lot of employers started to hire people on casual and part-time contracts. There is now evidence to suggest that many of those positions have migrated into permanent, full-time jobs and that people have decent and sustainable jobs. We have all travelled a significant journey over the past few years and are now at a point where 90% of all the jobs created last year were full-time. I accept that it has to be about quality and sustainable jobs, secure contracts and so on.

My point on some of the amendments proposed by Senators Cullinane and Zappone is the appropriateness of putting such considerations into primary legislation. I am convinced that the principles they explored in their contributions are something of which the Low Pay Commission will very mindful and will feed into its work when it considers not just the rate of the national minimum wage, but the other items I, and other Government colleagues, will ask it to explore over the next period of time.