Plight of precariat must be addressed

Nearly 160,000 people have significant variations in their hours of work, writes Michael Clifford

WE’RE on the road back to the future. The economy is booming, and likely to get boomier, as once put by the pied piper of the tiger years, Bertie Ahern.

This is to be welcomed, as long as it’s sustainable, or at the least capable of ending in that elusive outcome known as the soft landing.

All the stats point to an economy moving at full steam ahead but the stat that really matters is surely that of employment. In that regard, the news could hardly be better. Unemployment was at 6.1% for the month of January. In the depths of the recession in 2011, it was tipping 16%.

A survey by Bank of Ireland published last Monday pointed to nearly half of employees expecting a pay raise this year. Their expectations appear realistic as the same survey has 44% of employers expecting to give a rise.

So on the face of it, the only way is up. Except if you scratch beneath the surface the bright, shining stats lose their sheen. An increase in employment today does not mean an increase in jobs. The nature of work has changed dramatically in the 10 years since the collapse of the global economy.

A growing cohort of the workforce is earning a crust in precarious employment. This can be, in the case of retail and other services, not knowing how much work is available from one week to the next. Another aspect of precarious employment involves being forced to register as self-employed and told to provide services but receive none of the benefits or protections available to contracted employees.

They don’t have any certainty. The work is precarious. Their plans are precarious. They don’t have a platform or base from which to build on their hopes and dreams, such as buying a home, or starting, not to mind raising, a family. This does not augur well for any kind of social cohesion going into the future.

Younger workers in all sectors are today engaged in precarious employment, including those who are well educated. Last year, the Teachers Union of Ireland was told that one third of teachers don’t have a full-time contract. Around half of teachers under the age of 30 endure these working conditions.

In December, the Irish Congress of Trade Unions issued a report which claimed that nearly 160,000 people have significant variations in their hours of work from week to week or month to month.

The category of worker which has gone through a dramatic rise is that of “part-time self-employed without employees”. This, the report stated, has risen by 34% since 2008, and is “indicative of significant growth in bogus or false self-employment”.

The prevalence of precarious work has led to the labelling of this new form or worker, or indeed citizen. Economist Guy Standing popularised the term “Precariat” with his 2014 book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class. He pointed to the precariat being defined as having “lives dominated by insecurity, debt, uncertainty and humiliation. They are becoming denizens rather than citizens, losing cultural, social political and economic rights built up over generations”.

By far the biggest manifestation of precarious employment in this country concerns bogus self-employment.

This is the system in which workers are not taken on as employees. Instead, they are told that they can only work if they register as self-employed in what is a bogus categorisation. These workers are not providing services to a number of different clients or customers, as any self-employed person would. They are, to all effects and purposes, employed by a single entity, but forced to present as providing services rather than being employed.

The cost to an employer of employing somebody and the protections afforded an employee are thus wiped out. When this category of worker then finds themselves out of work, they usually have major issues acquiring social welfare payments as they have been categorised as self-employed.

Late last year, RTÉ Radio’s Drivetime programme investigated bogus self-employment right across the economy.

Reporter Philip Boucher-Hayes found that it was rife even within the national broadcaster. His report found that there are two types of employees in RTÉ, PAYE workers who have contracts with the full range of benefits and protections, and the second tier, who do the same job but have none of the benefits or protections.

“They’re self-employed and they’re not self-employed because they choose to be,” Boucher Hayes reported.

The issue is particularly pervasive in the construction industry.

Last month, a new trade union was formed to attack the “scourge” of bogus self employment in the industry. The Connect union is an amalgamation of existing unions which together has around 45,000 members.

At the launch, the general secretary of Connect, Paddy Kavanagh, pointed out that research has shown that the State is losing up to €300m annually in lost tax and PRSI through bogus self-employment.

Last week, the director general of the Construction Industry Federation, Tom Parlon, claimed that the issue is “grossly exaggerated”.

He told thejournal.ie that there are self-employed specialist workers who legitimately work in the industry. “But if a contractor gets 100 people he needs to work, he can only give them that work while the job is on. After that, he doesn’t have work for them,” Parlon said.

The reasoning does not, however, address a body of evidence that a large number of workers are told when they show up on site that they must be self- employed, whether they like it or not.

On publication of the ICTU report in December, the body’s secretary general of ICTU, Patricia King, referred to the fall-out from the emergence of the Precariat.

“As the study clearly illustrates, the impact of precarious work extends well beyond the workplace and its unchallenged growth raises profound questions as to the type of society we wish to live in,” she said.

She has a point. While the big picture statistics are showing an economy going at a rate of knots, there are major problems with the distribution of the fruits of the boom. Capital is now really making hay by minimising investment in labour.

The bonds that tied employer and employee are being slackened.

Putting some kind of shape on the future of society is easiest to achieve when times are good. That’s why it is incumbent on the Government to ensure that the workplace does not evolve in a manner likely to lead to instability or the creation of a separate class which cannot set down roots because of its precarious existence.

This country is not the worst example of growing inequity at the moment, but there are signs that a permanent underclass will emerge if something isn’t done to address the plight of the precariat. History shows that it is society as a whole that pays the ultimate price for that kind of folly.