During a meeting with Minister English CSNA CEO Vincent Jennings took the opportunity to ask the Minister if the previously-stated timeline for the Government Sick Leave Bill needed to be adjusted given the pace of progress the Bill was encountering in the legislative process.
Having followed the IBEC/ICTU presentation to the Enterprise Committee it was obvious that the Bill as published was meeting with a number of problems; on the employer side the 3 month lead in and the automatic dragging in of all employees on private sector schemes where all terms were not better, and the Congress were upset about the mandatory requirement for Certification, given the cost of attendance at a GP.
The Minister stated that the Bill had a number of issues contained within it that needed to be “dealt with “ before it could be progressed, and that, in his view, it would not be passed into legislation before April, with a lead-in time for necessary contractual and payroll software changes to be provided for.