Frances Black (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Tánaiste. I am pleased to see this legislation being debated in the Chamber. I thank the Tánaiste and his Department for their work on this matter. I commend Senator Gavan, who introduced the National Minimum Wage (Protection of Employee Tips) Bill 2017. It laid the groundwork for the Government's legislation.

The restaurant industry and the wider hospitality sector have undoubtedly had a challenging time over the past couple of years. We saw unprecedented levels of unemployment in the sector, with a large number of people choosing to leave it and the closure of many small independent businesses. Despite the continued concern about the pandemic, it has been a relief to see our hospitality industry doing what it does best over the past fortnight. I wish it every success in the early days of the reopening of society.

We sometimes take for granted how important it is to contemporary life in Ireland to be able to sit down in a café, bar or restaurant. The industry provides much more to us than just food or drink. It is a space for community, conversation, relaxation and the stimulation of all of our senses. It provides us with a warm welcome and a space to celebrate life events with friends and family or to sit in a quiet corner and enjoy our own company. It also provides something significant to those it employs, something that is beyond a person's take-home payment.

There is a passage by the late Anthony Bourdain that encapsulates some of the importance of what hospitality provides to us all, not least those working in the industry. I hope it is okay to take the time to quote it. He stated:

You can always tell when a person has worked in a restaurant. There's an empathy ... a special understanding of the way a bunch of motley misfits can be a family. Service industry work develops the "soft skills" recruiters talk about on LinkedIn - discipline, promptness, the ability to absorb criticism, and most important, how to read people like a book. The work is thankless and fun and messy, and the world would be a kinder place if more people tried it. With all due respect to my former professors, I've long believed I gained more knowledge in kitchens, bars, and dining rooms than any college could even hold.

That really stood out to me because I too worked in the hospitality industry when I was a young single mother. It was a very vibrant job to have. Many of us will have a new-found appreciation for the hospitality industry following this pandemic. Appreciation, however, does not pay the bills. Unfortunately, the industry is not always fairly compensated for the contribution it makes to contemporary life. Many jobs in the service industry can be quite precarious and often they are not well paid. The hours can be very taxing and unsociable and are not well suited to parents or people in education or training or for those with caring responsibilities. We need to start attributing more value to the work of the industry and those employed in it.

Obviously, this Bill cannot address all of the insecurities to which I have just referred. I hope it will provide a little bit more security for employees and customers about tips and gratuities, how they are regulated and where they end up. While we need to ensure the basic pay for people employed in the sector is decent, tips and gratuities will continue to be an important addition to the gross income of those employed in the sector. There need to be robust protections in place. It should never be the case that there is uncertainty about where tips end up or how they are divided between the staff team at a café or a restaurant. It should absolutely never be the case that tips received by staff are used to cover their basic wage costs, as has been common practice in a number of high-profile venues in recent years. Tips are given in good faith by customers with the understanding that the tip is distributed to the staff team. That any business leader would mislead his or her customers and mistreat the staff in this way is very disappointing. I welcome the protections the Bill will provide in these circumstances.

I may be confused about this but I am disappointed the legislation does not protect cash tips in the same way as those paid by card. It seems nonsensical to enact this legislation and then to exclude a large portion of tips and gratuities by virtue of how they are paid. The employee has no say in the matter of how the payment is processed. A person who decides to pay with cash should not be disincentivised from doing so. We are living in an increasingly cashless society, but both cash and card payments should be treated the same in the context of this legislation.

I would like to see the legislation include more robust guidelines for service charges that are applied automatically to a bill at the end of a meal. Many people, when they go to a café or restaurant, believe they are paying a tip when a mandatory service charge is applied. While I appreciate the Bill stipulates that businesses must display their policy and practice in respect of service charges, surely it still misleads paying customers to suggest that the advertised price of the meal does not match their bill at the end.

Additionally in my reading of the Bill, it does not stipulate that policies around optional service charges ought to be displayed in a transparent way by a business. Many service charges are levied at the discretion of the bill payer. Again, people perceive the payment of a discretionary service charge as being the equivalent of leaving a tip for a staff team. While many businesses do distribute the takings for service charges to their employees, we should not give space for an anomaly to exist in this way between those businesses that apply mandatory charges over discretionary service charges.

I reiterate my broad support for this Bill and its contents, and I look forward to working with my colleagues in the weeks ahead in the House to make the legislation as strong as it can be for the customers and employees of the service and hospitality industry.