Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 13 November 2018
80. Deputy Willie Penrose asked the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection when it is planned to introduce the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2017 in Seanad Éireann; and the amendments she plans to make to the Bill. [46881/18]
View answerWhen does the Minister intend to introduce this Bill in the Seanad? We passed it in this House last July. The legislation is urgently needed.
I am pleased to confirm that the Bill is scheduled for Second Stage in the Seanad on 20 November and for Committee Stage on 28 November. I am currently considering a small number of amendments, some of which are drafting amendments or just technicalities to be brought forward on Committee Stage. I will clarify the position during the Second Stage debate. The Bill delivers on the commitment in A Programme for a Partnership Government to tackle the problems caused by the increased casualisation of work and to strengthen the regulations relating to precarious work. This is important legislation, the key objective of which is to improve the security and predictability of working hours for employees on insecure contracts and those working variable hours in all sectors of employment.
Good progress has been made over the past number of years, in the context of our economic recovery, to create new job opportunities, the majority of which are full-time positions. While this is great, we must remember those people who, not by choice, are in less secure arrangements and may not know from week to week what hours they are working. This makes it difficult for them to plan their lives outside work. The Bill will significantly improve the employment protections for all of those people. I want the Bill to complete its passage through the Oireachtas as quickly as possible in the current session. If we all work closely together, we will get this out of the Seanad and back into the Dáil and completed before Christmas so that we can deliver for the people who are in those precarious situations this year.
I thank the Minister and I am glad to see this important legislation will progress. We will all put our backs behind it to make sure it is accelerated and becomes law. I am aware that the Minister reviewed a number of aspects of the Bill as passed by the Dáil. Has she re-examined the various arguments made in the Dáil by Labour Party Deputies and colleagues in the other parties to deal with if-and-when contracts? If these rotten arrangements are not dealt with, they will become the weapon of choice for bad employers and that is the worry, even though there are thousands of good employers who work well with their employees.
There are elements of the proposed legislation that are welcome and many of them were drawn from the proposals of my colleague, Senator Ged Nash, which he put forward to the Government in late 2015. It seems that for most workers trapped on if-and-when contracts, their work will continue to be treated as casual. This will deny them access to important provisions because they will not be classified as employees in the first place. For example, if-and-when workers will not be able to request to be placed on an appropriate band of hours to better reflect the reality of the hours they work, as other workers can. Has the Minister given any thought to that?
Yes, we have given it loads of thought. Each of the main elements of this Bill will improve the employment protections for people on if-and-when contracts. The banded hours provision, for example, will apply to somebody on such a contract so that if they have worked an average number of hours over the previous 12-month reference period, they will be entitled to be placed on the band of hours that reflects the realities of those hours that have been worked. The amendments to the terms of the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 will require employers to inform their employees including those on if-and-when arrangements by the fifth day of commencing employment what the employer reasonably expects the normal length of the working day and the working week to be. Employers will also be required to state the expected duration of their contract and whether that contract is fixed or temporary. Employees on if-and-when contracts will also benefit from the new minimum compensation provisions. Where they are given notice of hours of work but do not receive those hours, they will have to be given their two hours' compensation in lieu of the work they have not been given. Finally, employees on if-and-when contracts will also benefit from the anti-penalisation provisions in order that if an employer penalises them for exercising their rights under this Act, they will be entitled to pursue the matter through the WRC.
There is an urgent need for these provisions, giving hope and dignity to a cohort of workers who need to be brought in from the cold and given some hope for the future. We in the Labour Party have certainly not changed our policy or views on if-and-when contracts. My colleague, Senator Ged Nash, will table amendments to the legislation in the Seanad to address this problem. Particularly, he will propose an amendment providing that where a period of employment has to be calculated, casual work should be included in the calculation if the casual worker was employed on a regular or systematic basis and if during the period of service the worker has a reasonable expectation of ongoing employment by the same employer. That is important. The law must have regard to the basic facts of working life such as whether the employee was offered work regularly, whether the employee generally accepted work when it was offered and whether there was a pattern or system to the work offered each week even if the amount of work offered might have varied. Those are important components and indicia of a situation that should be comprehended and captured within the Bill. That is the one amendment that I can signal already that Senator Nash will be proposing.
I have not seen the amendment but I have spoken to the Senator and I will disagree with what he is attempting to do. The Senator Nash wants us to ban if-and-when contracts but there are so many industries in this country, government being one of them, that simply could not live without such contracts. I do not want to make life difficult for industry in carrying on its normal business but we will not tolerate a situation where people who are working on if-and-when contracts do not have the same employment protections as everybody else. I am prepared to move a bit this way if Labour Party Members are prepared to move a bit that way. I cannot countenance banning them even if all the Deputies and Senators gang up on me because there would be a significant backlash but perhaps we can try to achieve the same thing, which is to provide protections in law for the people who are currently working in those circumstances. We might have a win-win situation.
It is like the dance. We should come up a good bit of the way and the Minister might go and meet us.
