Annie Hoey (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I echo Senator Wall's comments thanking our colleague, Senator Sherlock, for the work she has done on this legislation and overall for apprentices and workers. It is an indictment of how we treat apprentices that they are not included in minimum wage legislation. For the first couple of years of some apprenticeships, the pay can be as low as €6.84 or €8.45, which is far off the minimum wage. We are here today because we want that changed. We need to encourage young people into apprenticeships in areas like construction in order to address labour shortages holding back the building and retrofitting of homes. We know contractors are finding it difficult to find and retain apprentices, particularly in year one and two of apprenticeships. Connect Trade Union has said excluding apprentices from being paid the minimum wage is forcing young workers out of the craft sector.

I met people from the Welsh Senedd last week. They spoke of how Ireland has a global image of craft and culture. When we see the decline in the number of people engaging in those sectors, it is very disappointing.

This Bill will stop discouragement and remove the barriers to people taking up apprenticeships. There are other barriers beyond pay, but in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, money talks. The Bill is about ensuring that all apprentices across the 66 apprenticeships will be paid fairly and not used as cheap labour in certain sectors, that there will be a steady and sustained flow of skilled labour into the sectors and that no working person will be paid less than minimum wage.

Much of our focus is on the construction sector, both for new builds and retrofitting, to tackle the housing crisis - and a crisis it is unfortunately. Earlier today, however, the Joint Committee on Tourism, Culture, Arts, Sport and Media, of which I am a member, ended up having a conversation about apprentices, even though that was not what it was supposed to be doing. It was supposed to be discussing rural tourism. We somehow found ourselves – perhaps strategically on my part – discussing apprenticeships. We want booming and thriving tourism, hospitality and retail sectors, but I was struck by the imbalance in where some of the apprentices are. We spoke about cheffing and who has access to apprenticeships in this regard. The majority of them are in Munster, which puts Dublin and the west at a huge disadvantage because people who want to go further in their apprenticeship training find in their fourth and fifth years that the have to train in Munster. They are obliged to travel to and from Munster or to get accommodation there. That is having a knock-on impact. I will circle back to what we were originally talking about, namely, accommodation. They are not able to get accommodation, travel up and down or take the time to move down there. It is a bigger problem than just in relation to the construction sector.

I do not doubt the Government commitment to apprenticeships, whether from the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science or otherwise. We want to see managed, joined-up thinking on this. It does not just fall under one Department. The Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications has set up the heat and built environment task force. That task force will have to look at how apprentices and apprenticeships will contribute to dealing with that issue. The Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science wants to get 50,000 new apprenticeships into the system. The Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage will have a role to play. Not only do we want to see our apprentices paid the minimum wage, we want to see a strategic, managed, cross-departmental approach to utilising learning opportunities, not only for the sake of such opportunities – which are important – but also to drill down into the nitty-gritty of some of the areas in which we will need apprentices in the future. Many of us have spoken about housing in this regard in the context of both retrofitting and new builds.

We all have stories about apprentices. My colleague, Senator Wall, spoke of someone who got their first pay packet and realised they would not be able to continue with it. Perhaps they were not made aware of it beforehand but it is a reality for people that they cannot afford to do apprenticeships. In this cost-of-living crisis when we desperately need to get people into the sector, I do not think we can afford to not pay apprentices the minimum wage. We are not looking for highfalutin stuff but for a minimum wage for apprentices because we need them to contribute to housing construction and retrofitting and across sectors. I mentioned tourism and hospitality but there is a plethora of sectors in which we need apprentices. The Government’s plan and targets for number of apprentices will not be met if we cannot get to the baseline of a minimum wage for them. I join others in being concerned about kicking this down the road for 12 months. That is not sending a good signal to those looking to diversify their education and contribute to the much-needed apprenticeship sector