Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. It is rather ironic that we are sitting in this House with female Members discussing the gender pay gap in the most unfriendly female workspace in the country. The furore we had when the Minister for Justice was pregnant and seeking maternity leave was outrageous as was that this should happen in a modern society.

November 9 has been mentioned today as the day when women will stop being paid while men will continue on receiving payment. The 14% figure has been mentioned. The State has set targets of a reduction of 9% by 2025, 4% by 2030, and eliminating pay discrimination by 2035. Let us be honest about it because pay legislation has been enacted for over 40 years. Why would we take to 2035 to flatten the curve to have everybody in the same pay? That baffles me.

I commend Senator Bacik and the Labour Party for their Bill which was brought into this House in 2017. I ask the Minister as he passes through Committee and Report Stages here to seriously take on board any amendments that are brought forward. Senator Bacik, in particular, has been a great champion of equality right down through the years for as long as I can remember.

The issue of pay gaps in the public sector does not arise to a great deal. In my time as president of the Teachers Union of Ireland I came across eight women who were employed by a vocational education committee as teachers, who worked a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. job every week and through the month of July. They received the month of August as holidays. When I came across these women, the first thing that crossed my mind was that the vocational education committee would not have dreamed of doing that if there was one man on the staff. The bottom line therefore is that women have been exploited right through the ages. I know from working with men in an environment where we had equal pay that the issue of pregnancy was a constant issue of discussion which revolved around how women were planning their pregnancy to ensure that they were out for a year or were doing this, that or the other. We have to get away from that and start treating people as equals.

I have many things I wish to say here but time is running short. The public sector is very good insofar as labour is organised and represented. People have been talking here about going to the Workplace Relations Commission to make representations on issues such as pay. None or very few individuals are strong enough to go into the WRC on their own to fight their corner. That is why I will use my last two seconds or minute to plead with people in the private sector to join a union and to become part of organised labour where one has somebody watching one’s back all of the time. So many companies now want people to come in without being members of organised labour. They say that they will have a workplace committee and we have legislated for that. Exploitation, however, is going on all of the time and most of the time in my 25 years of trade unionism most of the exploitation that I saw was against women. I am pleading with women in the private sector to organise labour, join a trade union to be represented and to go forward as a cohesive group. That is the one request I make.

Stopping off at 50 employees as a threshold is not the way to go. We need to drop that threshold down to 20 or even ten employees. There is no such requirement as we have known for a long time that this is coming. There is no need to stage this in the way the Minister is talking about. As my time a short I will stop there.