Debate contribution: Workers' Rights

Debate contribution by Mr Declan Kearney on 12 March 2024.

MLA: Mr Declan Kearney
Party at the time: Sinn Féin
Date: 12 March 2024
Type: Debate contribution
Business: Private Members' Business
Heading: Workers' Rights
Assembly identifier: Official Report component 4266703

Text

The overarching economic model that we live within has become a byword for workforce and workplace inequalities and exploitation. The motion highlights the nature of some of the most systemic inequalities that exist today, such as a lack of access to paid carer's leave, the lack of entitlement to keep tips and gratuities, fire and rehire practices, and bogus self-employment scams. My party accepts the amendment that is presented by the DUP. We feel that it is a helpful contribution to the scope of the motion. The motion also extends solidarity to all workers and families and the trade union movement in their campaigns to improve workers' rights, terms and conditions. The race-to-the-bottom approach throughout Ireland has created what the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) has described in its policy paper 'No Going Back' as:
"an economic crisis that is qualitatively different to any other recession in modern times."
We all know, see and even experience the repercussions of the current cost-of-living crisis. The living standards that were once viewed as denoting relative affluence have now become the characteristics of the working poor. Those who are enduring precarious work have become described as the "precariat". The Irish Congress of Trade Unions has appealed to us all, North and South, to rethink our approach to dealing with those issues and to reconsider and embrace policies that were previously rejected as, perhaps, politically impossible. This is a time for new thinking. Continuing to recycle and use the same policy processes in the expectation of different results is a recipe for more of the same. A paradigm shift is required towards economic and industrial strategy and employment relations in this region. The starting point for how to do so is contained in the New Decade, New Approach agreement. We need a new deal for workers and families. Those who suffer the indignity of wage inequality, poor working conditions and discrimination at work, and are pushed to the margins of society, are young people, women and disabled people. They are our family members, friends and neighbours. They are the essential front-line workers, who give most and get least in return. A new deal needs to be negotiated for all of them. That is possible. It can be done through social dialogue between the Irish congress, employers, Ministers and the Assembly; a properly structured tripartite model of engagement that conforms to the international definitions and standards that are set down by the International Labour Organization. That has been codified in 'Democracy at Work', which was launched here just last week. I commend that document to all Members and parties in the Assembly. It points towards a step change, which, if implemented, will work for all in society. That change must also extend to changing the financial model by which the region is funded in order to also guarantee the delivery of good, sustainable, proper public services. Collectively, we must campaign for and secure a financial settlement that allows the reversal of historic underinvestment and the consequences of Tory austerity in the North. We must also begin to imaginatively and strategically engage with how the island economy, North/South implementation bodies and the North/South Ministerial Council itself can become new drivers for economic growth and productivity on the basis of good employment and working conditions. The motion seeks to unlock a new economic debate about a different approach to industrial and employment relations, but that discussion is not an end in itself. It needs to become a process, involving our Assembly Chamber, scrutiny Committees and Executive Ministers, which widens out to and maximises popular participation. If we embrace that discussion as a shared opportunity, the end can take the form of a public policy framework and Programme for Government that conform to democratic equality, needs-based outcomes and, most importantly, a political and policy consensus that puts the priorities of workers and families in this place at the heart of our political institutions.

656 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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