A Mafioso who controls your neighbourhood runs into financial difficulties, having lost heavily in the gambling casinos. He owes a fortune to bigger sharks.
He shakes you and your neighbours down for 15% of monthly income. Naturally you feel aggrieved so you all get together and form an organisation to see what can be done. You call it a union.
You appoint a Secretary to go and say to the gangster, ‘Hey we can’t afford this anymore, We’re hurting, what with mortgage payments, childcare costs, not to mention a few extra payments being demanded by other members of your family, so can you please stop the monthly extortion?,
Your union Secretary comes back and says. ‘Great news, I have a revolutionary and transformational agreement!’
‘Brilliant, so the shakedown stops immediately?’
‘Er no – the 15% stays but he has generously agreed to extort only the same amount between now and 2014.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes and in return for that generosity you must call to his mansion to clean and polish, repair and paint, do the lawn, run any errands and make yourself generally available early, late and weekends. You see he had to let staff go and so you must do their work.’
‘Transformational alright, we’re being transformed into vassals!’
A far-fetched allegory to represent the outcome of the public sector negotiations announced yesterday? Not so far-fetched really.
It beggars belief that public sector trade union leaders would have the neck to come back to their members with what they’ve agreed with the Government. They were supposedly leading a campaign for the reversal of the wage cuts. Now, they not only reaffirming those cuts but cut a deal that would allow more reductions in pay for some workers, and thousands more jobs lost in services like Health which means a worse service for people generally.
For example If no overtime applies for any work between 8.00am and 8.00pm this will cut out both shift premia and overtime rates on which very many low paid workers depend to supplement a miserable basic pay. These workers will have to make up for the non-replacement of thousands of colleagues leaving the service. So it will be more work for less pay.
What piles insult on top of grievous injury is that these proposals emerge on the same day as the government proposes to shovel about €20 billion into the banks from taxpayers’ funds or through loans for which taxpayers will be made liable. So we have a circle of ironies here.
Banks and speculators cause the crash. As a result public sector workers pay is savaged. Banks and speculators are bailed out. Taxes from the savaged wage of the public sector workers fund this bailout.
And the response to this turning on its head of all that is fair and just? From the same predictable commentators in the same predictable media outlets we hear the same predictable nauseating question as to whether ‘the markets’ would be reassured as a result of the bailout and the public sector proposals.
Again ‘the markets’ are being given divine pre-eminence to dictate that workers’ wages are hammered and that public services are slashed. Again no outlining of the fact that ‘the markers’ are profit thirsty speculators organised through hedge funds or predatory banks, manipulating currencies and engineering instability where they can, to justify soaking massively greater interest rates from government loans, which means from working people and the poor in society.
Trade unions were founded to defend workers from rapacious capitalists a century and more ago. As young organisations, and in several countries, many entered the annals of history through heroic struggles for decency and justice for working people, the bedrock of any economic system.
Yesterday in Ireland history was turned on its head. Irish trade union leaders became enforcers for the financial sharks who are holding societies to ransom while the taxes of workers go to fill their bellies. They are agreeing to tie the union membership hand and foot so that they cannot resist while they are being economically gutted. That is the effect of a no strike clause which they have agreed on top of the other provisions.
Workers in the public sector should reject with contempt what their leaders and the government are trying to pass off as a ‘transformational’ deal. Workers in the public and private sectors should reject with contempt the use of their funds to save the skins of the rapacious international bondholders and the national speculators.
Together they should demand a real nationalisation of the banks under the democratic ownership and control of working people which would be one important pillar for the building of an economy for the benefit of the vast majority in society rather than one dictated by the appetites of financial vultures.
CHECK OUT OTHER RELATED ARTICLES:
- Proposed public sector deal is a breathtaking sellout of low and middle income workers
- Support Public Service Workers’ Industrial Action Against Savage Pay Cuts
- Union leaders discuss sell out despite historic strike
- Determined fight from unions needed to stop government onslaught
- Press Conference: For All Out Resistance to Public Sector Wage Cuts
