I wish everybody in this House a happy May Day this Friday. I particularly extend that to the staff in Leinster House who work so hard to allow us as representatives to do our jobs and work so hard. Of course, many of the staff here are union members. I thank Sinn Féin for bringing forward this motion, which succinctly captures the four key issues we need to address and strengthen workers' rights in this country: recognising collective bargaining, giving unions access to the workplace so they can recruit and organise, matching the minimum wage with the living wage, and finally dealing with remote and flexible working in a way that works, not in a way that simply pays lip service to it. We are an outlier in Europe in not recognising unions. That is a problematic issue in many areas I have dealt with in my portfolio dealing with employment. The voluntarist system does not work. I have worked in the private sector and the public sector and I have owned my own business, so I understand why the voluntarist system cannot work. It is because if a company is driven by profit, it does not ever choose to recognise workers' rights over shareholders' interests. It will never be something it will choose to do or volunteer to do. What the voluntarist system tries to do will never work because the power imbalance is too out of kilter. I was at an event recently and heard a European commentator describe von der Leyen's approach on this European Union Administration as uncritically pro-business. That is an absolutely perfect term to capture the attitude of this Government: uncritically pro-business. In so many decisions it makes, policies it designs and laws it enacts, it thinks about business and how the market can solve our problems, to the detriment of all other interests in society. That is how it chooses to address this and that is why we persistently keep this voluntarist model we all know does not work. We have heard a lot about the Covalen workers today. I joined those workers on their strike in Sandyford in my constituency a number of months back, when 300 jobs were under threat - never mind the 700 now under threat. They are part of the Communications Workers' Union. I then attended the digital and tech workers alliance chapter of that union. It is so hard for unions to recruit. People will ask why they should bother signing up to a union because when it goes to the negotiating table, it has no power to drive the employer to that table. Unions face a huge issue with recruitment and membership will always remain low if we have this voluntarist model. Despite that, speaking at the launch of the data chapter of the Communications Workers' Union was one of the most exciting moments I have had as a TD because it felt to me like the momentum we know from trade union movements of old, where people recognised that collective bargaining and collective action are crucial. There is a power imbalance which can only be addressed by solidarity and by speaking and acting together. That is what we need to do. Those Covalen workers trained the AI agents which are now taking their jobs. They are the little tip of the iceberg we will see emerge in the coming weeks, months and years, which will devastate sectors of the workforce across society. Anything that is text-based - lawyers, journalists and accountants - is under threat because data models can take the information and do a lot of the tasks we do. We will see labour displacement through this industrial revolution - the fourth industrial revolution, the AI revolution - at a pace and scale we have never seen before as a species. In this country, we have no power as workers to combat that or deal with it as the challenge it is. There are many other crises and challenges facing our workforce. When I ask about youth unemployment, I get back that we have more people in jobs in Ireland than ever before and we have full employment. Youth unemployment is a canary in a coalmine. If we do not watch out for it and start to recognise it is coming in other areas, then we are setting ourselves up for failure. I will be bringing legislation shortly to strengthen the right to request and to access remote and flexible working arrangements. It is not working as it is. We need legislation that allows people to put that question to their employer and directs that the employer cannot just pull out of thin air something they feel is an appropriate answer but has a categorised set of responses. We also need that to kick in from people's first day in their job. At the moment, it only kicks in six months after they start. There is bogus self-employment, in-work poverty, the cost-of-living crisis we are all facing and the reduction in quality. ICTU has been out and about recently talking about quality work and quality jobs. The gig economy has started what we know is coming across multiple sectors in terms of automation, AI and the precarity of work they drive. When we say we have full employment, it masks the fact that much of that employment is poor quality. It is employment which does not allow people to advance in life or move out of their parents' home; it does not give them security or allow them to make decisions about living their lives and fulfilling their potential. It keeps them down, as so many of these mechanisms do. AI will keep coming at us. We do not have the social structures in place as it stands with this voluntarist system to combat that, deal with it and treat it in the just-transition way we need to think about. When we talk about just transition of the climate, we need to tack on to that the digital just transition that we should be considering. There will be such a level of job displacement that we need to see this as the crisis it is. The other thing we need to call out is the resistance the Government has to the improvements we have seen in jobs and working conditions that have come through from the EU. Although we eventually transpose those things, we do so kicking and screaming. In terms of the current obligations we are trying to meet as Union members, I have heard Government representatives say the JLCs fulfil our commitments to collective bargaining, which is absolute nonsense. The JLCs are working in some cases. I absolutely can see that. There are ways in which they are good but they are not good across the board. Some of them has hardly met and that does not create a situation where workers feel in any way empowered or in any way that they have a fair shout in terms of dealing with their employers. The vision we need to seek is of a social democratic society where unions are properly recognised, where people can sign up for their trade union, where they do not have to hide and furtively discuss the idea of organising within their workplaces, and where access to the workplace is provided to unions which allows people to organise and to bargain collectively for better pay and working conditions. We need that system where the living wage is where our minimum wage is at and where people can access remote working and flexible working arrangements and that they can do so with the power of collective action, that they can sit at a table and expect their employer will meet them at that table. Right now, they can choose to collectively unite and to collectively act but when they go to that table, the voluntary system means the employer simply does not have to come to it and say, "No thanks". I have heard of companies where one plant will recognise unions and another plant does not and that is just as a result of historical legacy issues where in one company issues are dealt with by human resources while in other it is dealt with by proper industrial relations mechanisms. That is ridiculous. It is absolutely insane that you cannot rely on the security of trade union membership and what collective action can bring to you in the workplace and that, literally, in one company, it can change from one thing to the other. We must address the power imbalance we currently have and we must force employers to come to the table. This motion does exactly that by outlining those key issues that need to be addressed: collective bargaining, union access, living wage and remote working.

Sentiment score: -0.04