Louth senator Ged Nash says new Employment Bill will 'transform lives'

Louth Labour senator Ged Nash has welcomed the passing of the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill through both houses of the Oireachtais yesterday, saying it will "transform the lives and living standards of tens of thousands of workers in areas such as retail and hospitality.”

The Bill seeks to address the challenges thrown up by the increased casualisation of work and to strengthen the regulation of precarious employment.

The main provisions of the Bill are as follows:

• Employers must give employees basic terms of employment within five days;
• Prohibits zero hour contracts except in situations of genuine casual employment and where they are essential to allow employers to provide cover in emergency situations or to cover short-term absence;
• A new minimum payment for employees called in to work but sent home again without work;
• Banded Hours provisions: a new right for employees whose contract of employment does not reflect the reality of the hours they habitually work whereby they will be entitled to be placed in a band of hours that better reflects the hours they have worked over a 12 month reference period;
• Anti-penalisation provisions: The Bill provides strong anti-penalisation provisions for employees who invoke their rights under this legislation.

Senator Nash said:

“These new laws have been four years in the making. These reforms started life as a Labour Party initiative in the summer of 2014 when I initiated, as Minister for Employment, the first ever comprehensive examination of the prevalence of zero hours and low hours contracts undertaken in Ireland with an expert team from the University of Limerick.

“The recommendations I brought to government in early 2016 are by and large reflected in the legislation passed today.

“This new set of radical employment rights reforms will mean that from next year, workers who are currently going to bed on a Sunday night not knowing how many hours they will work that week and consequently what they will earn will have much more certainty over their hours and security over their incomes.

“This is the least that people who work hard for a living should be entitled to expect.

“My concerns remain though over the robustness of this legislation insofar as it covers the insidious phenomenon ‘if and when’ contracts which we identified in the University of Limerick study.

“I will be maintaining a close eye on the operation of the legislation in this context.

“Thanks to an amendment in the Seanad from the Labour Party, the Act will come into operation next March and not in June as the government had originally intended.

“Those in precarious work in Ireland have waited long enough for greater legal protection and an enforceable floor of decency in terms of working hours for all workers.

“My Labour Party colleagues and I are proud to have pioneered this process which will transform the lives and living standards of tens of thousands of workers in areas such as retail and hospitality.”

The new Bill commences in the first week of March 2019.