Sir, – During the pandemic emergency, many companies have introduced remote working from home. This has had several beneficial results: reducing social contacts and thus limiting the spread of the virus; helping to reduce greenhouse gases by cutting the number of car commutes; giving flexibility to parents with school-going children, and so on.
However, looking forward to the end of the pandemic, perhaps there are already some cute corporate accountants pondering the fact that if remote working can perform well from Bray or Lucan or Swords, then perhaps it can also perform equally well from India or the Philippines at a fraction of the cost! I certainly hope that the various employee representative bodies, and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, are aware of such a potential development and are actively preparing political strategies to counteract it. If not, they need to get their skates on, as such a development can only be stopped before it actually starts.
Indeed, I hope that our TDs are also aware that any such remote outsourcing would inevitably result in the destruction of possibly tens of thousands of Irish jobs (in addition to the major losses already caused by Covid-19). Is it too much to expect that our Government can for once anticipate events, rather than simply react to them? – Yours, etc,
MAURICE KING,
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Inistioge,
Co Kilkenny.