Unity

From Unity, 12 December 2009

Class collaboration no answer

by W. Owl

On 31 July 1925, in the midst of another capitalist crisis, the British Tory Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, stated: “All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.” The standard answer to all capitalist crises, and the one the Irish Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, is echoing. Unfortunately, some of the trade union leaders in the Republic are equally echoing the actions of those British trade union leaders who in 1926 called off the General Strike even as some workers were joining it.
     A report in the Irish News, 2 December, stated that a second one-day strike by 250,000 public-sector workers had been called off due to the fact that the Government and trade unions had “edged closer to agreeing pay cuts of €1.3 billion.”
     The discussions apparently “centred on two weeks of unpaid leave and sweeping changes to shift patterns to slash overtime.”
     Not surprisingly, Cowen “welcomed” the decision to suspend the strike. Not so representatives from the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, the Teachers‘ Union of Ireland, and SIPTU, who were quoted in the Irish News report as stating that the Irish Congress of Trade Unions’ negotiating team had no mandate to talk with the Government on pay cuts, adding: “It would be the greatest betrayal in the history of the Irish trade union movement,” going on to argue that the ICTU negotiators were just “Government agents.”
     This was after 250,000 public-sector workers had staged a one-day strike against wage cuts and in defence of public services the previous week.
     That night the ICTU general secretary, David Begg, appeared on TV3’s Vincent Browne show alongside an economist, a journalist from the Irish Independent, and a disgruntled representative from the TUI. Begg denied all the way through the programme that the unpaid leave, which now amounted to twelve days, resembled anything like a pay cut.
     The Unite union has estimated that anyone earning €35,000 would lose €100 per month.
     Perhaps the pay cut could simply be called a donation to the national coffers.
     Begg did himself no favours by this insistence that it was not a pay cut when he and others know full well that the Government is demanding no less than a cut in wages. His argument was akin to the one about how many angels can you balance on the head of a pin.
     Frustrated by his lack of convincing argument, he resorted to the age-old claim that, whilst it was not the best thing on offer, things could be far worse if the ICTU didn’t go along with it.
     The TUI member quite rightly pointed out again that the ICTU had no mandate from any trade union organisation in Ireland.
     Unfortunately, when challenged by Vincent Browne as to what workers would do if the Government, “as no doubt it will,” enforces the cuts, he didn’t give the best response. He did, though, suggest the reforming of the tax system, meaning that those who can afford it, i.e. the rich, pay more rather than making the workers shoulder the whole burden.
     The economist on the panel was aghast. It was as if it had been suggested that there was no god. “They will all leave the country,” he exclaimed, as though that would be a bad thing. Of course they wouldn’t, and more’s the pity.
     Incidentally, the following day it was reported that directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland had threatened to resign if they couldn’t get bonus payments. Fair play to the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable, who suggested that their bluff should be called. It won’t happen, though, will it ?
     Anyway, back to the Vincent Browne show.
     The economist, after getting over the shock of suggested tax increases for the rich, claimed that the idea of unpaid leave was unwieldy and then went on to put forward the more simplistic idea of just cutting public-sector pay across the board. Shades of Stanley Baldwin.
     Browne, to his credit, put forward an argument, backed up by figures, that tax increases on the top earners would bring in the billions of euros the Government requires.
     Gulping of glasses of water by the economist ensued.
     Last but not least, we had the Irish Independent journalist. He totally empathised with the private-sector workers, and so his suggestion was that to even things up the public sector should suffer just as much. After listening to him and other journalists from that newspaper on Browne’s show, it only convinces you that its politics echo those of its previous owner, William Martin Murphy, who instigated the 1913 Lockout in Dublin and called for Connolly and other Easter Rising leaders “to be dealt with as they deserve.”
     The solutions these people put forward are as old as the hills, and so is the class collaboration shown by the ICTU leadership.

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