Paul Gavan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have a brief point on the Defence Forces. The best way we can help them is to grant them the right to collective bargaining, a right that was upheld by the European Committee of Social Rights. If Fine Gael Senators are serious about helping the Defence Forces they should call on their own Government to support collective bargaining rights.

I want to raise another issue with regard to workers' rights. Tomorrow the workers in Lloyds Pharmacy will take their fourth day of strike action. Lloyds Pharmacy is owned by the McKesson Corporation, which has annual revenues of €198.5 billion. Yesterday evening we had a presentation from some of the workers. I regret to say nobody from the Fine Gael side took the time to come along. We heard a couple of interesting facts. The first is these people are extremely poorly paid. We heard from one lady who, after working for Lloyds Pharmacy for 15 years, received a pay increase of the princely sum of 5 cent an hour, which brought her up, after those 15 years, to €10.50.

The second fact is the McKesson Corporation deals with unions all the time. For example, it owns United Drug and has no problem with doing a deal with the unions there. It recognises them and pays decent wages. Interestingly, the workforce of United Drug is predominantly male while at Lloyds Pharmacy the workforce is almost exclusively female, and they have been completely denied the right to collective bargaining. It is the biggest pharmaceutical company in the State and the workers are denied even a basic sick pay scheme.

My point is we have this huge corporation earning millions of euro in taxpayers' money through the HSE medical card scheme and something needs to be done about this. The Government needs to address this issue of companies flagrantly disregarding the industrial relations machinery of the State, flagrantly disregarding the Labour Court in this case, and flagrantly disregarding workers' rights and continuing to receive massive largesse. Last week, we united to call for full support for Lloyds Pharmacy workers. We need to re-echo this call. These people are fighting for fundamental workers' rights and they are being treated appallingly by one of the richest corporations in the world. I contend that one of the reasons for this is the predominantly female workforce. If we want to understand the gender pay gap look at how Lloyds Pharmacy is treating its workers.