Mr. Chairman, I will continue the answer I began to give to Mr. Proulx last week in answer to his question. I am afraid that I am not in a position to give you any good news. The clarifications I will provide will not elicit feelings of great joy, either in you or in part-time workers.
I would like to place all of this in the context of the seasonal jobs that we have here at the House of Commons. I believe that I stated last week that we had tried to resolve the problems with respect to part-time workers. This is an issue we have been grappling with since 2001, I believe.
In some areas, we have trouble predicting in advance how much work there will be. For example, we will need additional staff in the restaurants and cafeterias if there is a lot of demand for catering services. Also, depending on the amount of work generated by the committees, we will need more or less staff in parliamentary publications.
Having said that, we always need a pool of so-called seasonal workers. We have therefore established a group of workers that we call indeterminate accredited seasonal workers. These people work when the House is sitting, and are assigned primarily to Parliamentary Publications and Restaurant Services. For these workers, there is no problem obtaining the 700 hours you refer to; I will come back to this in a moment.
At the time, we had a pool of part-time workers. Some of them worked more that 700 hours. However, under labour legislation that governs our activities, those employees are entitled to benefits. Otherwise, we would have been abusing part-time employees. At the same time, we need seasonal workers. That is why we established the group that we call accredited seasonal workers. They receive all the benefits the union has negotiated, even though they are seasonal employees.
We have 12 such positions in Parliamentary Publications, including eight full-time equivalents, and 27 in Restaurant Services. We posted competition notices so that part-time workers could apply for these jobs, which have been filled. Those workers now have benefits such as dental insurance, pharmacare, and so on, under certain conditions, but they are seasonal workers.
The workers you are referring to are the ones who work part-time. We fairly regularly recruit par-time workers in order to be able to dip into that pool whenever we need additional manpower, which happens on occasion. So, if there are a lot of committee meetings, we can call on these workers. They must, indeed, work fewer than 700 hours a year.
Overall, seasonal staff represent 5 per cent of the House of Commons total workforce, which is about 100 people. Part-time, on-call employees represent about 11 per cent of the House of Commons staff complement, or about 200 people.