| From Socialist Voice, January 2010 |
The labour movement must rely on its own resourcesWith the ending of talks between the Government and unions in December, and the imposition of pay cuts throughout the public sector, the architecture of the national wage agreements has effectually collapsed. Although they may have preferred to retain some foothold in the process, members of the public-sector unions must now recognise that continuing such talks would be little less than an outright cave-in.he time has now come—and this is to be welcomed—for the unions to finally put some real distance between themselves and this moribund Government. Most public-service union leaders so far have indicated that they will be advocating a policy of non-cooperation with the sort of transformation measures the Government is seeking. The Government wants an efficiency drive; but the unions, which were willing to deliver on this in December, are now indicating that members will not only block proposed reforms but may also row back on changes previously conceded.Taking this a step further, some union leaders—notably Jack O’Connor—are of the view that only a major organised campaign of industrial action throughout the public sector, with the target of reversing the drop in public servants’ take-home pay, is the sort of effort that the Government might take seriously. From this viewpoint—which Socialist Voice would readily agree with—reactive responses, such as work to rule, might be seen as a waste of time: what is required is a sustained, determined and organised effort. Such a campaign should certainly try to build upon the unlikely alliance that emanated out of the 24/7 and 9 to 5 groups. Admittedly, one of the possible difficulties is that unions, to a degree, have lost the “public relations” campaign in the face of an unremitting establishment media drive to portray public-sector workers as out of sync with their “dynamic” and “flexible” private-sector equivalents. Of course such claims are a nonsense and are based—like much else that emanates from the chattering classes of Montrose and Tara Street—on pro-enterprise ideology, which is hostile to the very idea of independent trade unionism. However, the media barrage means that union strategy for undermining the Government will be shaped by seeking to keep the public-sector unions “on side,” sections of which seem to have forgotten that an attack on one is inevitably an attack on all. The teachers’ unions and those in the health service may face particular problems in this regard. Therefore, while we should not underestimate the fact that the struggles ahead will be tough, such a strategy is fundamentally necessary if the unions are to retain any relevance, not just in the public sector but throughout the economy as a whole. In this regard, unions would be ill-advised to develop their informal contacts with Fine Gael. While they may hope they can do a deal that allows them to get “partnership” back on track after the next election, they should surely know that Fine Gael’s interest in national wage agreements is negligible: they were already reluctant partners between 1994 and 1997, while Richard Bruton has displayed strong aversion to a process that he sees as “undemocratic” and lacking in “consumer involvement” (the latter a by-word for an even more right-wing agenda). In any case, employers are not interested in “partnership” any more: they got what they wanted from it in the good years and feel they can now best serve their interests through local-level bargaining. It is no surprise, then, that Danny McCoy of IBEC has formally stated their intention to return to company-level bargaining in the coming year. In this context the labour movement must begin to rely on its own resources rather than on back-room deals at Government Buildings. [NC] |
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