Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The remote work strategy marks a significant move towards changing how we work for good. It is a framework for long-term change, and we need it. For over 100 years, we have used the same traditional model of work for office workers, a version of 9 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. that is office-based and location-based. For approximately one third of the population, this involves leaving home early in the morning, making an increasingly long commute to an area of high employment and coming home again in the evening. If we were designing a model of how we work from scratch, we just would not do it like that. Why? It is because our settlement patterns have always evolved around access to employment. People followed jobs, and our planning, economic investment strategies and transport systems have all developed around supporting this dominant model of location-based work.Therefore, some communities thrive when others try to survive, creating a stark urban and rural divide, perpetuating regional inequality. The old model of work also does not perform well for other groups such as women or disabled people, where Ireland has some of the lowest workforce participation rates in Europe. In general, women in Ireland, when they become mothers, still tend to be the ones taking up the majority of care, child rearing and domestic work. A one-size-fits-all approach to work simply is not practical, conducive or attractive to many of them. Other structural inequalities can be added, such as the lack of affordable and accessible childcare, even in places like Dublin 15 where it costs €10,000 per year on average, and one can begin to understand why the odds are stacked against them. This outdated approach to work is simply not fit for purpose anymore.

When we reached full employment a mere 18 months ago, there were working parents getting up at 5 a.m. to drop their children to family or to crèches to get to work, to afford to pay rent or mortgages and commuter times further and further away, coming home to kiss their children good night, and rear them at the weekend. They were trying to beat the crowd to get onto trains that were absolutely jammers at Coolmine or buses at Littlepace every morning, sitting in lines of cars spewing tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. These were people taking longer hours out of their day to secure the increasingly elusive social contract that many of our parents enjoyed, that is, the idea that if one works hard, one will have a nice life. As legislators, we tinker around the edges of a model of work that is fundamentally only suited to a limited amount of the population in an effort to rebalance workplace inequality, where people like me with good jobs, good education and ambition left those jobs when they have children because of the struggle to juggle everything financially, logistically and holistically. Is it any wonder that before Covid, surveys showed that most people would take work flexibility over a pay rise or that when Covid forced a third of workers to leave their offices behind and work from home that six months later, despite all the pressures that we are under, 94% of people surveyed said that they wanted remote working to be a feature of work for good? Is it a surprise that mortgage applications, according to Permanent TSB data, have gone up between 20% and 30% outside Dublin compared with prior to the first lockdown?

I could spend my 11 minutes telling everyone how great the Government is for recognising the potential of remote work when others did not, and in fairness, that would be deserved. It has invested €180 million in enterprise hubs, supporting over 300 hubs and 3,200 spaces nationally, and the innovative work of the Western Development Commission, the Atlantic economic corridor, Údarás na Gaeltachta and Grow Remote. It has forged ahead with the national broadband plan when others opposed it, undermined it, and just did not seem to get how fundamental it is to our digital and regional transformation, equal opportunities and work-life balance. That connectivity, through broadband and hubs, is at the very heart of locationless and remote working, of building remote-ready communities.

The Government has recognised the need for our first national remote working strategy and the actions that are required to build a framework around it - the legal, tax, health and safety environment, training and skills, the national and local infrastructure required to support it and its place in our planning strategies. However, there is an urgency that leaves no room for complacency. Covid has not fixed our problems of work-life balance, workplace inequalities or regional imbalance, it has just proven that we can do things differently. Where we go from here is entirely up to us. My message today is that the Government should go big or go back, and nobody wants the latter. When people start to return to offices, equal opportunities must be the cornerstone of our new approach. We have to do that from the start. If somebody feels disadvantaged by working remotely, office presenteeism will quickly return. I am sure everyone has heard the expression that "you don't get a promotion on Zoom". Nobody wants to see remote work become gendered and it really does not have to be that way. A remote-first culture means that technology brings people and their work together, not the office, not one location and not where the boss is.Making an organisation location-agnostic creates a level playing field no matter where one is, regardless of whether one is office based or availing of a hybrid arrangement, or whether the arrangement is for five days per week. As with other significant changes in our economic and social environment, the Government should prepare and help organisations through a remote-first transition and with best practice. We did it for Brexit and other major social and economic changes, and we should do it for this. The carrot is always better than the stick.

We need a full-scale communications campaign with case studies to show where anchor tenancies and local hubs can be secured by employers; where people who work from home are using best practice in health and safety; where the forthcoming right-to-disconnect proposals are part of the working policy; where head offices have been swapped for regional bubble offices for co-working and team meetings; and where existing building stock is repurposed for the same reason. Somebody working for a Department, for instance, might not have to travel to Dublin headquarters but just to the nearest county office, where he or she could work alongside other departmental staff. This is all part of the digital transformation of Ireland and, because of Covid, it is happening at an accelerated pace. We need to help people through it by showing them the potential for change and best practice.

There is too much emphasis on delivering two days per week at home and three days per week in the office. That is what we are defining other people's choice as. It still entails a location-based mindset. Without changing the culture, it could reinforce, rather than relieve, inequality. The Government should not define what the choice looks like; it should create a culture of choice so workers, with their employers, can figure out what works best for both.

Remote working is but one type of flexibility. There are others, including job sharing, compressed hours, annualised hours, core working hours and flexitime, to name just a few. The right to request should not just extend to remote working or working parents and carers, as outlined in the EU work-life balance directive. For all the reasons I mentioned, more people should have the chance to improve their quality of life. What about a young professional who could work compressed hours and then travel for a couple of months or parents who want to work in the office but whom it would suit to come in at 10 a.m. instead of another time? Only 40% of people working remotely at present are actually women. Part of the challenge regarding remote work is that it is not visible yet. It needs to take its place within the overall jobs sector or remote workers will continue to be invisible and we will undervalue the impact of remote working on communities.

Remote work is not coming; it is here already. According to EU Remote Jobs, there are 720,000 remote roles available in Ireland per year. Why are we not talking more about that? How many people here know the name of the biggest remote company in the world, which actually employs a thousand people in Ireland? It is GitLab. Salesforce has just gone remote. When companies advertise roles, they are still slow to offer them as remote. There has been a 1,754% increase in roles advertised as involving working from home on IrishJobs.ieby comparison with last year, but that is more of a reflection of the base we have come from, and it is still called working from home instead of remote working.

Over the new year period, there were three different IDA Ireland announcements about 270 new remote jobs for Ireland, but on Twitter all the fanfare was about the physical jobs being secured in Galway and Dublin, even though remote jobs can benefit every county in the country. We need to find a way to recognise and celebrate remote jobs, especially for areas that could would normally see a red ribbon moment. Have Members seen a photo op at someone's home office? They have not but maybe they should. If we are serious about remote work, as we should be, we must create pathways to remote employment nationally and locally. Grow Remote is already doing it. We already partner with it but we need to up the game nationally and join all the dots together into a remote work ecosystem. Any Government action plan for jobs should set out ambitions and measure remote jobs per local authority area.IDA research shows that for every two jobs secured in a community, another two are sustained locally. That means more people being able to live and work wherever they want. That is progress in regional balance. That is change but it will not happen organically or by accident. It has to be planned. Now is the time to think about building remote-ready communities, prioritising remote infrastructure in cities, towns and villages that are aligned with Project Ireland 2040 and the national development plan, securing access to housing and Irish Water supplies in order that growth is organised and planned, as well as about prioritising mixed-purpose communities and local development plans. Mixed-purpose communities flourished because of Covid, while single-purpose communities declined. It is time to think about investing in hubs and community childcare like we invest in schools in targeted areas, supporting sustainable transport and allowing people to work closer to home, breaking the dominant one-size-fits-all model of travelling long distance for the majority of the day, which is limiting and which drives inequality for women, primarily, as well as poor work-life balance. Instead, let us make work flexibility and childcare accessible.

The forthcoming town centre first strategy will be critical and we need to ensure more flexibility in changing planning uses from retail to offices and residential, making use of our vacant premises. Some people mistakenly believe remote work is all about rural Ireland and they are wrong. Mixed-purpose communities and hyper-proximity principles of 15-minute cities are just as important in Dublin. Would it not be great to see more families living in our cities, like other European cities? I want to see a co-working space on every main street in every village of Dublin 15, where people do not have the real estate or space for home offices. It is entirely achievable quicker than one might think. There has been a marked increase in the funding of broadband connection points, BCPs, and co-working spaces and communities around Ireland but we need more. We need those funds to be updated and made more available and specific to hub roll-out, including in Dublin where the same funding simply is not available.

There are ways to get better value for money too. Instead of local organisations all over the country finding different suppliers to kit out co-working spaces individually, we could devise something similar to the design and build template for schools, where we have a c of suppliers who will do it to a higher specification, getting better value for money and ensuring less variance. At present, there are more than 300 hubs around the country but they are primarily for enterprise, not co-working, and it is difficult to make the co-working model work financially. As well as taking their place in the network of hubs the Minister for Rural and Community Development, Deputy Humphreys, is introducing, I suggest the €3.20 employer tax relief be made available for employees working in such hubs. Long-term anchor tenancies is what they will need and that is dependent on an accessible, affordable and professional network of hubs. Revising the tax treatment and the limited return for personal tax relief is something I have spoken about at length and which I raised when I first entered the Seanad. It is simply not enough and it needs to play a bigger role while employers transition.

I do not stand here today as a party of one or even as one of just a party. This is bigger than that and the people with whom I work are fantastic and really believe in this. I refer to people like Tracy Keogh, John Evoy, John Riordan and Karen O'Reilly. The problems are well rehearsed. We have had a year to experiment because of Covid and people working from home but the problems can be overcome. I ask the Minister of State to work with us on that.