Emer Currie (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. I will focus on the work-life balance aspect of this Bill and the transposition of the directive, which the Minister has overseen. Additionally, I will comment on the inclusion of the right to request remote working, which is now contained under this legislation and was inherited from the Tánaiste's Department. It is a good move to have all this under one Bill. I very much welcome the inclusion of leave for victims of domestic abuse, the extension of breastfeeding breaks to two years and leave for medical care purposes. I commend the Minister and the joint committee for their introduction.

On the work-life balance elements of this legislation, we will now have flexible working arrangements contained in Irish law for the first time. This is significant. This part of the Bill has been widely overshadowed by the right to request remote working, even though remote working is only one type of flexibility and has limitations. Too much pressure is being put on remote work to deliver for everyone when there are many different types of flexibility. Flexible working arrangements open up possibilities like core working hours, compressed hours, reduced hours, flexi hours and jobshares, which offer radically more choices. After all, remote working does not work for everyone.

While the right to request remote working is universal, however, the right to request work flexibility is not. This will reduce its relevance and impact, unfortunately. The decision not to go beyond the directive's requirement to provide flexibility for parents and carers, although it does extend to children aged up to 12 rather than eight, reflecting the provisions of our current parental leave Act, means this legislation is not fully responding to the demand for workplace change that all workers want and have had a taste of during Covid-19. They do not really understand all the other aspects of flexibility that they could enjoy.

Rather than using the introduction of flexibility as an opportunity to challenge workplace stereotypes of employees who ask for flexibility instead of putting their career before life all the time, this Bill cements the perception that flexible working is something for parents and carers and, therefore, predominantly something that women do. Having listened to my colleague, this is where we are. Women are the ones who take on most caring duties. They will be the ones taking most advantage of this legislation.

To me, that is not good enough. As a society, we must challenge how we share the care. There are fundamental pillars to building gender equality and equal opportunities in the workplace. We need accessible and affordable childcare, flexible workplaces and a wider ethos of sharing the care. We have a mountain to climb in Ireland when it comes to that. With our current parental leave, women are three and a half times more likely to take it than men. When it comes to paternity leave, the take-up by men stands at around 50% even though it is now in its fifth year. Women with children are five times more likely to work part time than men with children. Our employment gap between men and women with children in 2021 stands at 18%, with 90% of men with children working compared to 72% women. We also know the more children women have, the further that figure drops. The longer they are out of the workforce, the harder it is to get them to return to work. According to the Central Statistics Office, CSO, that is reflected in the weekly earnings gap between men and women of approximately 23%.

It is clear that if we are going to shift the dial on sharing the care, we need more than the same. Similar to the provision of leave for parents, which men do not take up as much, and now the provision of flexibility for all parents and carers that women are also likely to take. We need a deliberate, fundamental and brave shift in creating shared opportunities and shared responsibility. Access to universal flexibility would help Ireland in that regard, as it has helped in other countries. According to the Oireachtas research brief on the Bill, Lithuania has a 1% employment gap, and universal flexibility is offered. Finland has taken a different approach. It has moved beyond the right to request and is the closest I have found to providing a universal right to flexibility. It is not completely a right for everybody, because it depends on their roles, but it has introduced core working hours in offices as the norm. That was done in 1996. Since then, the country has built on that with access to flexitime and now has built on that again with flexibility in location. That is as close to a right as I can find. In Finland, where there are two parents, both parents spend an equal amount of time with their children.

In the UK, the right to request flexibility from day one was introduced earlier this week. Iceland has also taken a different approach, with mandatory shared parental leave instead of separate maternity and paternity leave as a building block to sharing care, backed up with universal childcare provision from when a child is 18 months and it also has flexible workplaces. For that reason, Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world.

There are different ways to encourage the sharing of the care, but universal flexibility is one proven approach. I fear we are missing a golden opportunity. It is a positive step that parents and carers will have the opportunity for a better work-life balance, helping those who take it to maintain their careers. It will help keep women in the labour market by giving them more flexibility, but it will not change the culture of work in the way day-one universal flexibility would. It will not level the playing field between the young mum and the "always-on-er" in the way it could. It will not encourage men to take flexibility in the same way as a system of universal flexibility would. We are going to have a situation in teams where one employee will have access to flexibility and a colleague of the same experience will not. We know that remote working generally works better for people with more experience and for people who do not miss the social aspect of the office. They might have children or an established circle of friends. Then we will have younger career starters who want to be in the office, who do not want remote working, but who do not get other types of flexibility as well.

I will refer briefly to remote working. It is positive that there has been so much change to the Bill as we move through Committee Stage, but I am still concerned about the six-month wait because it does not remove location as a barrier. If a person is living in County Donegal and he or she wants to take a Dublin-based job remotely, he or she must work in the office in Dublin for six months before he or she can make the move. We are still basing remote work as something that people do a couple of days a week, as opposed to having remote roles for people and creating a digital-first or remote-first environment. The Minister has a role in taking the pressure off remote working because it does not work for everybody. We have put too much expectation into what remote working can do, but we must train companies on how to do it properly; how to create digital-first environments where the remote roles can thrive. We have spent €100 million on investing in communities and hubs. That is where people work, but we also need the supply of those jobs in order to keep those communities and hubs thriving.