Thatcher’s children

INDUSTRIAL strife stalks the landscape in Ireland at the moment. At the time of writing, Bus Éireann drivers have suspended industrial action temporarily and members of teaching unions are engaged in a ballot on potential industrial action from September. All in all, it’s not a good time to be a worker. And yet, of course, it’s most certainly not a good time to be unemployed. Unless you are a highly paid employee in a lucrative wing of the private sector, it’s probably not a good time to be in Ireland at all.

 

A Supreme Court decision on May 9 described the Registered Employment Agreement (REA) system around the determination of pay rates as unconstitutional. The legal firm Mason, Hayes and Curren stated, “This decision is likely to have significant consequences for employers and employees in the electrical industry (it was the Electrical REA being challenged) but also other sectors governed by REAs, including construction, retail and printing.”

The striking down of the REA system begs the question as to what will now govern the area of pay? Unfortunately, the most likely answer is that the market will now take precedence and now workers will be glad to hear that such a thing is true.

Of course, the Supreme Court is the highest in the land and if it deems something unconstitutional, I am certainly in no position to argue against it. This ruling, however, does raise an important issue and that is legislating for fairness.

In a market-driven economy like Ireland’s and all in the EU, to be fair, to have anything enshrined in law which legislatively promotes fairness with regard to wages or can be viewed as anti-markets or competitiveness is a non-starter. Competition is paramount and the protection of business interests an ultimate goal.

We hear endless proclamations and statements from politicians all over the continent about the need to return economies to a state of growth. In Ireland, the relentless desire to “get the economy moving again” has very serious implications for those who work in the public sector. Cost-cutting measures have been in place for some time now but the fresh round of wage and condition cuts being sought by the Government has led to a direct threat of industrial action.

It is not surprising that public sector unions have come to the decision to ballot their members on action. There is an extreme unfairness in the continued persecution of public sector workers. Of course, fairness is not something we have come to expect in the current climate. What is more worrying is the continued dismantling of the State. There can be no doubt that the IMF has a lot to do with the project.

All over the world it has, since its inception, demanded privatisation and deregulation from those nations unfortunate enough to need its financial “aid”. As has been pointed out by many in the civil service, however, the need to attract the best and brightest to run the country will suffer if this persecution continues.

For many years there has been a kind of propaganda, which has somehow morphed into received wisdom that the civil service, and the public sector generally, was some kind of behemoth, which consumed money and did nothing. The reasons for this were quoted as too many people with nothing to do and the reason for this? The unions.

It seems that while Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Regan spread neoliberal capitalism all over the world in the ’80s, the seeds of their project seeped into the Irish consciousness too. In the intervening years, a kind of consensus has emerged that the received wisdom of neo-liberalism was correct and the Irish State apparatus has suffered the consequences since. I would argue that it is this indoctrination that has led to the staggering lack of outcry in defence of public sector workers in recent years.

We must remember that it was a private sector crash and that it was the State who bailed out the banks. This, more than any other aspect of the sorry state, is what rankles. The private sector wants freedom to operate without regulation and make massive profit without State interference until there is a problem that threatens the very integrity of the State, when a rescue package must put in place to the detriment of future generations.

Despite what the dominant capitalist ideology suggests, the State cannot be eradicated completely. It needs to provide certain services and protections to the people that the private sector cannot because of the profit demands. Despite what many claim, employment legislation cannot provide the protection for workers that a union can. The suggestion that it can serves only to justify the atomisation of workers and their weakening and isolation as a result. If the solidarity and protection offered by unions was not present, the public sector would have suffered a lot more until this point than it has.

Nobody wants to see industrial action but if this is what it takes to show the Government that they can no longer just take what they need from those who serve the State, then so be it. To a very large extent, this current impasse is an important one from the perspective that it might serve to stop the rot of public service persecution.

What we have been shown through this crisis, as much as anything else, is the fallacy that at the end of a working life, you will have all that you were promised. The extent to which the futures of everybody could be selfishly and ruthlessly gambled away by a small number of people should serve as a great eye-opener. It must bring people together in solidarity to fight what might be imposed by a Government attempting to paper over the cracks.

The public service provides what everyone takes for granted but without which the nation would be sorely disadvantaged and, for this, they deserve the support of the nation in their struggle against cuts.