Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

On behalf of the Labour Party group, I express heartfelt sympathies to Bridget Doody and her family on the passing of her brother.

I will speak about the announcement yesterday that the Government's living wage plan has been agreed and approved by the Cabinet. What is the point of launching a plan to improve wages and then doing nothing about it? The Government says it wants to see an increase in the national minimum wage to 60% of median earnings in the next four years. That is great. It is very much to be welcomed, but we are seeing zero progress towards meeting the minimum wage target next year. In 2022, the national minimum wage was 51.8% of expected median earnings. In 2023, the national minimum wage will be 51.8% of expected median earnings. These are not my projections but the Government's projections. Some would say that must be a joke if we are serious about the minimum wage becoming a living wage in the next four years. To add insult to injury for low wage workers, there is nothing in the Government's plan that was published yesterday to fix the sub-minimum rate issue. Young workers aged 18 and 19 who are deemed to be adults in law are treated like children in the context of the payment of the national minimum wage and that is wrong. A number of us are already quite sceptical of the Government's living wage plan because it stretches beyond the lifetime of this Government into 2026. What is effectively happening now is that the Government has decided it will hand the heavy lifting involved in meeting this plan to the next Government. There is an onus on the Government of the day to bring minimum wages to 60% of median earnings because an EU directive on the issue was approved by EU leaders in October. The EU directive on adequate minimum wages stipulates that countries must bring their minimum wage to 60% of median earnings. There is an irony in yesterday's publication. If it was doing something about improving the minimum wage that would be positive but it takes place in the context that we still have 16,000 security workers in this country who had a pay deal negotiated with their employers. The Minister was injuncted in August and we still have the State doing nothing substantive to try to ensure that this winter and into next year those security workers have a pay increase. The court case was in for hearing on Tuesday of this week and it has been put back to some unknown date. That is not right for these are low-wage workers. We spent so much of the pandemic lauding low-wage workers and their contributions and yet this Government is not standing by them when it matters in terms of pay increases.