Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State to the House and congratulate him on retaining a ministerial post.

I will talk about the occupational health services, particularly in the teaching profession. Some of the letters I have seen with respect to teachers with underlying health conditions are frightening, where the occupational health service says a person is in a high-risk capacity but not a very high-risk capacity, that he or she would be eligible to continue in his or her teaching role but can only teach one student and must be protected here, there and everywhere. Effectively what they are doing is kicking back the issue of ill health or underlying conditions to the school board of management. I know that the Minister of State will probably have sat on a school board of management. It is unfair. Boards of management are not qualified to deal with these issues.

I support fully my colleagues in the Labour Party with this motion. Covid has shone a light into the dark area of employment law and significant issues faced by low-paid workers in many sectors. The absence of any legal right to sick pay by an employee in this country is scandalous, especially in a strong First World economy that is part of the European Union. Employees in meat processing factories recently had to make a choice between their income and health, which is unacceptable. That they had to do that during a highly contagious pandemic is unconscionable, a pandemic in which not only their own health was put at risk but also the lives of the people they shared the community with.

We are now caught in the strong swell of a second wave that can be traced back to the first outbreaks in the meat factories after a very successful lockdown, but the lack of legislation on the issue of mandatory sick pay has failed us for far too long, and all in the name of profit. The argument is made that the State already provides for sick workers through illness benefit subject to a number of qualifying conditions. For the information of the Minister of State, Members of both this House and the Lower House who lost their seats in the previous election will not qualify for sick pay, should they be lucky enough to find employment, for some time to come because of class K PRSI, which is something that really needs to be examined. We are using the PRSI code as a tax. Who would pay for insurance and get nothing for it?

With the increasing number of workers on short-term contracts, otherwise known as precarious employment, many find it difficult to accrue the necessary contributions and, when ill, find themselves without any income at all. Many are hired overseas, and even though they work in Ireland, they pay no PRSI contributions. Again, there are precarious employment situations, especially in construction. I had the occasion to report an incident of builders' labourers, men with shovels and wheelbarrows, being declared self-employed on building sites purely to get around the PRSI and tax code.

We know that companies operate in very tight environments and compete for the lowest cost. We know that every penny counts, but in calculating and deciding what profit level a company needs to survive and thrive, sick pay should be factored in as a given and firmly rooted in employment law. As it is, there is far too much exploitation, particularly of migrant workers who work mainly in the construction, hospitality, caring, retail, food and processing industries. The Migrant Rights Centre Ireland said recently, "The prevalence of exploitation and routine breaches of basic employment standards in the sectors examined is staggering." We have workers in this country who are not even given the pay they are legally entitled to, and on top of that, they do not have any sick pay. Indeed, a person contacted me recently who was told by one of these employers who employs people from outside the country that they were paying emergency tax and should contact the Revenue Commissioners to recoup the tax they had paid. When the person contacted the Revenue Commissioners, the person was advised that Revenue had not received any tax in the name of this person after six months. There is something wrong with the fact that we are allowing that to go on.

Being part of a race to the bottom in employment conditions and law is something that Ireland should not be proud of. We should be deeply embarrassed by it. Patricia King, general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU, recently said that "up to half of the labour force, including hundreds of thousands of low-paid essential workers, do not receive sick pay and ... [are] financially compelled to keep on working when sick". Right now, in the middle of this Covid crisis, the lowest paid in our society - the cleaners, refuse collectors and people like that - are treated in an appalling way. My own view is that these workers should be paid the same money as consultants because without them we would all be sick.

For workers who are fortunate enough to have sick pay as part of their contract of employment, I would also recommend taking out income continuance insurance for those who can afford it. We need a State-based income continuance insurance so that where an employee gets sick he or she would be guaranteed up to 75% of his or her salary. I applaud organisations like SIPTU, Forfás, the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation, INMO, the Garda Representative Association, GRA, the Teachers Union of Ireland, TUI, the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland, ASTI, and the Irish National Teachers Organisation, INTO - I could go on. All of these unions have done what the State could not. They have done deals with insurance companies to ensure that their members have access to income continuance insurance. Unfortunately, with the way precarious employment has gone and short-term contracts, an awful lot of these people who once held cherished jobs in this country - being a nurse, teacher or any of those things once was a cherished career - sadly, they have now become short-term positions and are of little value.

Employees' income must be guaranteed at every stage in the life cycle. Going back to the teachers I spoke about at the outset, if a teacher is told by the occupational health people that he or she is high risk but not very high risk, the board of management says that person cannot not come to work and to go back to his or her GP, and the GP says he or she is not prepared to certify that teacher to go into a school and teach, after a period that teacher drops off the sick leave payment within the Department of Education and Skills and becomes broke, which is simply not on.

I welcome the motion tabled by the Labour Party. Once again, I am delighted to see the Labour Party row in four-square behind the trade union movement and workers of this country, and I congratulate it on bringing the motion forward. I hope what we do not have is lip service paid to this motion. I hope what we do have is the Minister of State and his Government colleagues coming forward with a complete suite of welfare for workers. We have learned over the past six months just how important the lowest paid workers in this country are - the front-line cleaners, refuse collectors, receptionists and office staff - and it is time we started to treat them the way we would like to be treated ourselves.