Poposed sick pay provisions being championed by Tánaiste Leo Varadkar do not go far enough and their introduction may be seen as an opportunity in some sectors to drop existing occupational schemes, senior Siptu official Greg Ennis has said.
Referring to the situation in the State’s meat plants, Mr Ennis – the union’s manufacturing division organiser – said 38 per cent of workers in the sector had had Covid-19 during the first 22 months of the pandemic. He said incidence within the industry remains particularly high because workers are unable to afford to take sick leave when ill.
He acknowledged that some improvements have been implemented by companies since the start of the pandemic. But he added that the environment inside plants was still conducive to spread of the virus.
“It’s still a massive issue within the sector. Transmission rates are very, very high,” he said at Siptu’s biennial conference in Sligo. “It has all the vectors for the transmission of Covid: low temperatures due industrial air cooling systems and because of the noise pollution, workers are forced to shout to communicate.”
The situation is having consequential effects in communities, in part because landlords are crowding too many overseas workers into houses, he said. “The practice of landlords filling their houses in the midlands with 20 and 30 people is an absolute scandal, a disgrace. Some of them might be working in different meat plants and then you wonder why contagion rates are so high.”
“My guess would be, and I’d be pretty confident about it, that the percentage of infected people in the meat industry is surpassed only by people in nursing homes, residential care and hospitals who are dealing with Covid patients.
“The issue then is that 93 per cent of the 15,600 workforce in the Irish red and white meat sectors do not have sick pay provision. Consequently, they’re put in the invidious position of deciding whether to attend work or not when they have symptoms because if you’re earning €450 or €480 a week, which is the basic pay for most of these workers, losing a third of your income by dropping to the Enhanced Illness Benefit isn’t really an option.
Rising inflation
“Then you have the ESRI are saying inflation is going to peak at 8.5 per cent and it’s going to be 6.7 per cent for the year.
“Build that in and those workers are really hurting because none of their money is disposable income, they have to spend it all to survive, paying rent and for food etc. So that’s why Leo Varadkar’s approach to dealing with this has been too slow. It’s also extremely limited in its structure with regard to getting into 10 days sick pay over four years. It’s not nearly good enough.”
Measures need to be taken to protect those occupational schemes that exist once legislation for sick pay is introduced, he said. And he added that companies should do more for their employees.
“The four biggest producers in the meat industry in Ireland would have turnover in the billions. And while the margin of profit is less for meat than it is in other sectors of the economy there still is the wherewithal and the means to look after workers and to give them a decent sick pay provision; enough to ensure that they’re not forced into this position of thinking, ‘I mightn’t feel too well, but I will still have to go to work’.”
