Frances Black (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the Chamber and commend Senators Gavan, Ruane and Warfield on tabling this Bill. I am delighted to speak strongly in its support.

We are dealing with a very basic principle here, which is that of equal pay for equal work. It is the same principle underlying recent pushes to close the gender pay gap, and ensure that women are paid as much as their male colleagues. It is a crucial part of much of our anti-discrimination legislation, which states that no one should be paid less on the basis of their religion, sexuality, race, disability status, and so on. However, we also include age as a factor here, because we know that young people deserve that same protection against discrimination.

In its 2018 budget submission, the National Youth Council of Ireland spoke up for the rights of young people and stated very clearly that sub-minimum rates of pay fly in the face of this commitment and are fundamentally discriminatory in nature. The Government’s own special rapporteur on child protection, Dr. Geoffrey Shannon, who has done fantastic work on the alcohol issue and so many other areas, made the same point in his report in 2015. He said the rates we are debating today constitute unjust discrimination and he is absolutely right.

One of the most important achievements of the labour movement over the past century, in this country and elsewhere, has been in forcefully making the case that there are basic standards in any society that must always be respected, including a decent income and working conditions. In a fair system, there should be a moral floor below which no one will fall. A proper, widely applicable minimum wage is a vital part of that. It sets that lower limit and offers key protections for workers. It ensures they will not be pitted against one another and exploited, driving wages down and people into poverty.

Unfortunately, young workers are increasingly obliged to fight against this sort of exploitation. We are witnessing a wider cultural shift in which unpaid or underpaid work is becoming a rite of passage for young people, seen as a standard step towards full-time employment. This is a discriminatory, exclusionary practice that wrecks social mobility. If one comes from a well-off family and can afford to work for free for a year or two then avenues are open to one but if one does not have those same resources, if one needs to be paid for one's time and efforts, then these opportunities are off-limits. We need to question the assumptions behind such thinking.

When key welfare rates are cut for those under 25 years, or justifications are presented for paying them less than the minimum wage, it seems we are assuming that they have the resources and family supports needed to take up the slack. Many people do not. This point has been strongly made by the National Youth Council of Ireland, which has emphasised the need to maintain supports for young people in lower-income households in particular, especially those most at risk of poverty and social exclusion.

During debates on this issue often hear about early school leavers but that misses the point. Empowerment for those young people is not delivered by pitting them against one another and scaring them off with substandard wages, it is delivered by investing properly in social supports and getting serious about economic inequality. It is delivered by addressing the deeper educational disadvantages at the root of early school leaving, not by cutting wages by 30%.

Mandate and other trade unions have highlighted the type of discrimination that results, particularly as companies struggled to deal with a crippling recession in recent years. In too many cases, young people were seen as the easy answer to a problem they did not create. Employers would hire young workers on JobBridge schemes or below minimum wages, let them do the work for a year, and then simply replace them with another young person waiting in the wings. This is exactly the kind of race to the bottom the minimum wage was introduced to protect against and this Bill is an important step in that direction. I offer it my full support today.