Plight of foreign workers ignored

IT was February 8. Reading back over it, you would swear it was way back in the distant past, something about Russian serfs towards the end of the 19th century.

The shame of it was that it was February 8, 2005, when Joe Higgins rose to his feet in the Dáil. The story he told seemed incredible, fantastical: “There is a major foreign-based multinational construction company employing approximately 10,000 people, 2,000 approximately in this State, which has secured massive local authority and State contracts here.

“This company imports workers from its home base, who do not speak English, controls their passports and work permits, accommodates them often in company barracks, demands an extent of hours worked that can only be called grotesque and, incredibly, pays unskilled construction workers between €2 and €3 per hour basic pay and skilled workers somewhere over €3 an hour.

“In short, this is a modern version of bonded labour.”

But it wasn’t Dostoevsky territory. All of Higgins’ claims were subsequently borne out. Many of the stories about Gama’s unconscionable treatment of its workers were first broken by my colleague, Michael O’Farrell.

Since 1995, Irish society has changed more than it did over the preceding century, bar the periods of revolution and foreign wars.

The new Ireland has been written about to death and I don’t intend to go lolling in the soft comforts of our latte and ciabatta society. There is one point to make. A rocket-propelled economy quickly found itself facing a crisis that got too little attention.

Since 1997, the numbers in employment have grown by nearly 450,000. At the same time, the number of unemployed people fell by almost 80,000 from 10.4% to 4.7%. The long-term unemployed account for only 1.5% of the workforce. Statistically, that’s about as low as you can go. To all intents and purposes, Ireland has full employment. We quickly moved from being a country of net emigration to one of net immigration.

With large number of foreign nationals arriving into Ireland, most of the focus invariably turned to the debate on our asylum process. The Government acted like Speedy Gonzalez in drawing up the drawbridge in that regard. But quietly - almost unnoticed - many thousands of others entered legally to take up jobs in the economy where there were skill shortages or to do jobs that the increasingly affluent Irish would no longer do. In 1999, 6,000 work permits were issued. By 2003, the figure was 48,000. In all, up to 150,000 foreign workers from outside the European Economic Area (the EU plus a few other countries) have come to Ireland over the past six years.

The problem was that the safeguards to protect the rights of those workers against exploitation were hopelessly out of date. The legislation governing this area is the Aliens Act, a whopping 70 years old, though it has been updated by various Ministerial Orders.

Though foreign workers were entitled to the same wages as Irish workers, it didn’t take long for unscrupulous operators to find the regime was as water-tight as a colander. Besides Gama, this year alone unearthed other egregious cases - a Filipino beautician being paid e1 an hour aboard an Irish Ferries’ ship; migrant farm labourers also being paid e1 an hour, with brown sauce sandwiches as their staple diet.

The reaction of the State to all this was shameful until Joe Higgins stood up in the Dáil last February.

Will the new legislation cure all ills? Certainly, Mícheál Martin has been far more pro-active than his predecessor. He has doubled the number of labour inspectors.

With the new legislation, the unsavoury practice of employers retaining passports and other documentation belonging to workers will be banned. Workers will also be entitled to a copy of a permit. But the employer will still hold the permit. You wonder will that really make any difference in the end, whether it will really free foreign workers in Ireland from their sense of being indentured.