Aontú supports workers' rights. Good work should ensure good pay, terms and conditions. A worker who works hard should have a decent wage and should be able to live well. Aontú is committed to justice in the workplace and the rights of workers on the island of Ireland to fair pay for fair work, and to allow for fair living conditions. We support dignity at work and the rights of workers to equitable pay and working environments. Low pay and precarious work affect many people in this country. Some firms are treating workers without respect and with limited guarantees in terms of paid hours. I brought in the Banded Hours Contract Bill back in 2015. That Bill aimed to address erratic working hours in this country. Right now we need a strong and resourced agency to ensure proper compliance and legislation enforcement in these practices. Exploitative work such as bogus self-employment is a significant problem still today. It is an incredible situation. It robs the State of the taxes it is entitled to. That should be rooted out. It also robs the workers themselves of their rights and safeguards in terms of being able to look after holiday pay, sick pay and pension entitlements. The national minimum wage needs to be sufficient, in truth, to deal with the 140,000 workers who currently are the working poor in Ireland. It is an incredible situation that 140,000 people are working but still do not have enough to be able to make ends meet in this country. That is a major problem. No business and no employer should have the right to build a business model that can only function when it provides a level of standards in terms of wages, pay and conditions that are not enough for people to be able to survive and live well. That should not be allowed. One of the biggest threats we have to the cohesion of the world at the moment is the over-concentration of wealth that exists and the fact that 1% of the wealthiest own about 43% of global assets. The lack of employee power in that relationship with employers leads in to that issue. The Government also needs to look at the role it plays in this. Public services really can help in terms of workers. It provides a social wage, a type of income top-up, in relation to this. It means that workers have more disposable income because the services that they need are provided properly by the State as well. In truth, when I speak to workers around the country they tell me that some of the biggest problems they have at the moment are the cost-of-living crisis, the price of houses and the cost of rent. If we look at the incompetency of this Government, in many ways it is driving wage inflation in this country because workers are trying to keep up to be able to pay for the costs that are coming at them. Before I became a TD I worked as a management consultant. I worked with hundreds of different businesses. I noticed very strongly that only when businesses are in equilibrium with employees in terms of the power dynamic are they likely to have a proper functioning business with happy employees who are productive and working well. When that power dynamic shifts and either one has too much power, that actually leads to a really difficult working situation and leads to damage to the functioning of that business. For an equilibrium and for a power balance to exist between employers and employees we must have the right to trade union membership and the right to collective bargaining. If we do not have that balance in the relationship, there will always be a section of employees at the wrong end of that power balance who will suffer. That suffering will be seen in exploitation and the loss of the ability to survive in terms of the work they do. We are calling for the Government to make sure that collective bargaining is brought into this country and that workers have a proper right to be represented.

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