Multinational companies are considering building staff housing for their employees to beat the emergency housing crisis and accommodation shortage in Ireland.
Top bosses have told representative lobbies like Chambers Ireland that housing is the number one issue facing their employees.
This is now also impacting on companies’ efforts to recruit and retain talented workers to work and base themselves here.
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And the solution being considered is to build entire housing estates to provide places to live for workers in sectors like Big Tech and pharmaceuticals.
This has happened before in the past in this country with major employers like Guinness and the ESB providing quality housing for their workers in great locations.
Thousands of these homes are still standing and are some of the most sought after properties in the country in places like Ringsend, the Liberties and Stoneybatter in Dublin city centre.
Speaking before an Oireachtas enterprise committee in Leinster House on Wednesday afternoon, Chambers Ireland chief executive, Ian Talbot, said: “The greatest challenge that our members face is the lack of available talent which is driven by affordable and appropriate housing being unavailable across most of the country.”
Mr Talbot continued: “Our members are having to take on new people, people without the skills or experience which their business needs, they train them up, and then when they are becoming productive members of staff they need higher wages for rent, soon the house hunting begins again, and then the cycle reoccurs.
“This is having a tremendous effect on the productivity of the Irish labour market.
“In the cities it’s an even greater challenge, the competition for talent is even higher, employees are able to find work in large multinationals across a wide variety of industries and sectors.
“It is becoming ever harder for smaller and medium sized firms to compete.
“Already, across the country large employers are buying up individual homes and houses so that they can ensure their employees have somewhere to stay.
“Several times in the last year we were contacted by businesses hoping to make big investments, potentially supporting hundreds of jobs, that were considering buying out entire housing estates, if that would allow them to grow their workforce.
“We know that the Irish units of multinationals are often not competitive for further internal investments because they cannot meet their existing employment targets never mind expand their workforce.
“We are growing as an economy, but we are not growing at the pace we could grow.
“Our domestic market has been constrained by this lack of housing.”
Meanwhile, a group specifically representing smaller businesses, ISME (Irish Small and Medium Enterprises), said that their members are really feeling the squeeze to pay staff more because of rising costs all round.
ISME chief executive Neil McDonnell told committee members: "The failure to control consumer costs is driving payroll expectations which many domestic employers simply cannot meet.”
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