The Right To Not Work
It's easy, too easy, to link a consumer society with the fact that we no longer how to deal with strikes.
That's a broad statement, but I'm fairly comfortable with it. You don't have to look too hard to hear people saying that "strikes should be banned" or "trade unions are pointless". Neither of those things are right, but we now have a fairly huge culture gap between the rights of the worker (as espoused by unions, and... well, no-one else, really) and the all-powerful rights of the consumer.
Still, it's a long time since Ireland has been comfortable with the notion of workers going on strike. There isn't the explicitly striated class system here that exists in Britain, and the process of Social Partnership has lead to Ireland's Trade Unions being tarred with the same viscous corruption that permeates throughout the establishment. If the Irish Trade Union movement isn't corrupt exactly, then it's certainly corrupted; any Trade Union that fails to separate its badly-paid lower orders and its well-paid upper echelons is failing the job description pretty much straight off the bat. Today's strike was, for those people at any rate, more a cynical exercise in sabre-rattling than anything else.
Still, the reaction of people complaining bitterly about the inconvenience is as difficult to listen to as the usual Trade Union rhetoric. Inconvenience is, bluntly, what strikes are for; you withdraw your labour, and thereby show its value. Teachers absenting themselves from work to highlight the value of the job they do. And yet, there have been no voices reflecting on the necessity to stay at home and mind their kid, or pay for a babysitter, and thought to themselves "Wow, teachers provide an important service, without which my life would cease to function." The reaction is to complain.
It's hardly surprising. If the last ten or fifteen years have encouraged us to do anything, it's not to look beyond our own horizons, and to view the privileges of Western culture with the non-stop sense of entitlement usually seen in spoiled four year-olds. Nobody is heard being grateful for the support that the state provides; you either complain that you don't get enough, or you complain that someone else gets too much. Teachers not showing up to work is, in todays' culture, almost indistinguishable from a waiter bringing a cold bowl of soup. Talk of "pay cuts" and "fairness" is about as relevant as the waiter telling you that the cooker's broken. At best, it's not our problem. At worst, They Should Be Glad To Have A Job and We Pay Their Wages, you know the drill. Nurses, teachers, Gardaí... ultimately these are well-trained, professional people, but our ownership of their professions seems to be a licence to treat them with contempt*.
(And if you want an example of that, then the holier-than-thou reaction to public sector workers - shock! horror! spending their day on strike going shopping in Norn Iron is the best example. These people had withdrawn their labour, which is all a striking worker is compelled to do; whether they joined the pickets or not was entirely up to them, and as the pickets ran in rotation it was possible to do both. As for criticism for them spending money outside the Republic, it's another fine example of the double-standard - plenty of people go North to shop, and if you tried to hold them to account for it, they'd throw "my rights as a consumer" back in your face pretty damn quick.)
It's difficult to blame people for being hostile to Trade Unions, who have shown exactly the same sense of entitlement, albeit in the other direction. The continuous references to the "vulnerable sectors of society" rankle - public sector workers aren't the most vulnerable members of society, not unless the homeless have all vanished and those floods are a media hallucination. The shallow comparison to How We Bailed Out Dem Bankers is so broadbrush that it seems designed to infuriate; the steadfast refusal to apparently acknowledge budget problems, or indeed to accept that there are huge structural problems within of the larger government departments, makes it seem like the Unions are lead by small children, sticking their fingers in their ears and singing "la la la, I'm not listening."
But.
Public workers are right to be shouting Stop, even if many of them are so shite at communicating their objections that they'd be better off sewing their own mouths shut. The amount of money being wasted by the government on other projects, on reports and consultancies and throwing good money on bad projects, dwarfs anything that public sector pay inefficiencies can throw at you. I could go on about this angle, but this isn't a rigorous economics blog, so I'll just say "Public Private Partnerships" and leave it there. The last time the government took money out of the public sector they made a complete mess of it, with all the bludgeoning incompetence you've come to expect, and there's bugger-all indication that they'll be any fairer this time round. The pensions levy was grotesque; it hit the lowest-paid the hardest to a shocking degree**, it insulted the intelligence by pretending it wasn't a pay cut when it so clearly was, and it didn't put a dent in the inexorable rise of Ireland's budget deficit. This one will almost certainly hit the lower-paid members yet again, and - as before - it will save us next to nothing***.
Irish politicians' ability to blend idiocy with low cunning is pretty damn special. It doesn't take much effort to see that they're pissing on the wrong bonfire; the public sector didn't get ten times the size in the last two years. We're fucked because social welfare has rocketed and tax receipts have collapsed, but talk about creating jobs is conspicuous by its absence. When it comes to job creation, or any form of invention at all, they're bereft of ideas; however, the ease with which they have made us all focus on the sideshow of public sector pay is breathtaking. It achieves nothing, in the overall scheme of things, but it panders to the gaze of our vengeful consumer-culture.
Really, that's all it's designed to do.
There's certainly a discussion to be had over the size of our public sector, but the government have yet to suggest any way of restructuring it. Instead they'll just insist on more blanket pay cuts, to which our tame, oh-so-part of the establishment Unions will eventually agree, once they're done flexing their muscles.
And so, if today's palaver won't make any difference in the long term, it's wrong to begrudge it. We forget the idea of social capital, of some jobs having more worth than market values suggest. Yes, the thought of overpaid administrative civil-servants feeling aggrieved at their lot is irredeemably ugly, but it's not entirely about them.
The people on strike were also nurses, teachers, and firemen; these people certainly aren't conspicuously well-off, and they've already taken a cut once. Yes, they have a relatively privileged position. But then, they're responsible for caring for our sick, educating our children, and running into burning buildings when we're running out; if they're paid more than a marketing analyst or IT guy, then maybe that's as it should be. Withdrawing their labour made them feel important; it made them feel like they mattered, in a country that no longer seems to give a shit what they do. If that's all that the Day of Action achieved, it's not nothing.
*Which is clearly unjustifiable. Except for the Gardaí, obviously.
** Someone earning €36,000 lost more money - in absolute terms, not percentages - from their take home pay than someone earning €45,000. Someone on €38,000 paid the same percentage as someone on €120,000. If you earned €26,500, you had to pay twice as much as someone earning €500 more. Don't parrot "Share the pain" or tell me that's not appalling.
*** 1.3 billion has been bandied around, almost certainly as a gross figure. Half of that (say) would have gone back to the government in income tax and levies anyway, so actual savings are €650,000. Take into account the resultant fall in spending, the fall in VAT receipts, and the multiplier effect and all that malarkey, and you can probably (at least) cut that in half again. You're looking at about €300m saving, which is more or less the amount thrown away in the average Public Private Partnership.
Oh look, that's twice I've mentioned PPPs. Funny that.
That's a broad statement, but I'm fairly comfortable with it. You don't have to look too hard to hear people saying that "strikes should be banned" or "trade unions are pointless". Neither of those things are right, but we now have a fairly huge culture gap between the rights of the worker (as espoused by unions, and... well, no-one else, really) and the all-powerful rights of the consumer.
Still, it's a long time since Ireland has been comfortable with the notion of workers going on strike. There isn't the explicitly striated class system here that exists in Britain, and the process of Social Partnership has lead to Ireland's Trade Unions being tarred with the same viscous corruption that permeates throughout the establishment. If the Irish Trade Union movement isn't corrupt exactly, then it's certainly corrupted; any Trade Union that fails to separate its badly-paid lower orders and its well-paid upper echelons is failing the job description pretty much straight off the bat. Today's strike was, for those people at any rate, more a cynical exercise in sabre-rattling than anything else.
Still, the reaction of people complaining bitterly about the inconvenience is as difficult to listen to as the usual Trade Union rhetoric. Inconvenience is, bluntly, what strikes are for; you withdraw your labour, and thereby show its value. Teachers absenting themselves from work to highlight the value of the job they do. And yet, there have been no voices reflecting on the necessity to stay at home and mind their kid, or pay for a babysitter, and thought to themselves "Wow, teachers provide an important service, without which my life would cease to function." The reaction is to complain.
It's hardly surprising. If the last ten or fifteen years have encouraged us to do anything, it's not to look beyond our own horizons, and to view the privileges of Western culture with the non-stop sense of entitlement usually seen in spoiled four year-olds. Nobody is heard being grateful for the support that the state provides; you either complain that you don't get enough, or you complain that someone else gets too much. Teachers not showing up to work is, in todays' culture, almost indistinguishable from a waiter bringing a cold bowl of soup. Talk of "pay cuts" and "fairness" is about as relevant as the waiter telling you that the cooker's broken. At best, it's not our problem. At worst, They Should Be Glad To Have A Job and We Pay Their Wages, you know the drill. Nurses, teachers, Gardaí... ultimately these are well-trained, professional people, but our ownership of their professions seems to be a licence to treat them with contempt*.
(And if you want an example of that, then the holier-than-thou reaction to public sector workers - shock! horror! spending their day on strike going shopping in Norn Iron is the best example. These people had withdrawn their labour, which is all a striking worker is compelled to do; whether they joined the pickets or not was entirely up to them, and as the pickets ran in rotation it was possible to do both. As for criticism for them spending money outside the Republic, it's another fine example of the double-standard - plenty of people go North to shop, and if you tried to hold them to account for it, they'd throw "my rights as a consumer" back in your face pretty damn quick.)
It's difficult to blame people for being hostile to Trade Unions, who have shown exactly the same sense of entitlement, albeit in the other direction. The continuous references to the "vulnerable sectors of society" rankle - public sector workers aren't the most vulnerable members of society, not unless the homeless have all vanished and those floods are a media hallucination. The shallow comparison to How We Bailed Out Dem Bankers is so broadbrush that it seems designed to infuriate; the steadfast refusal to apparently acknowledge budget problems, or indeed to accept that there are huge structural problems within of the larger government departments, makes it seem like the Unions are lead by small children, sticking their fingers in their ears and singing "la la la, I'm not listening."
But.
Public workers are right to be shouting Stop, even if many of them are so shite at communicating their objections that they'd be better off sewing their own mouths shut. The amount of money being wasted by the government on other projects, on reports and consultancies and throwing good money on bad projects, dwarfs anything that public sector pay inefficiencies can throw at you. I could go on about this angle, but this isn't a rigorous economics blog, so I'll just say "Public Private Partnerships" and leave it there. The last time the government took money out of the public sector they made a complete mess of it, with all the bludgeoning incompetence you've come to expect, and there's bugger-all indication that they'll be any fairer this time round. The pensions levy was grotesque; it hit the lowest-paid the hardest to a shocking degree**, it insulted the intelligence by pretending it wasn't a pay cut when it so clearly was, and it didn't put a dent in the inexorable rise of Ireland's budget deficit. This one will almost certainly hit the lower-paid members yet again, and - as before - it will save us next to nothing***.
Irish politicians' ability to blend idiocy with low cunning is pretty damn special. It doesn't take much effort to see that they're pissing on the wrong bonfire; the public sector didn't get ten times the size in the last two years. We're fucked because social welfare has rocketed and tax receipts have collapsed, but talk about creating jobs is conspicuous by its absence. When it comes to job creation, or any form of invention at all, they're bereft of ideas; however, the ease with which they have made us all focus on the sideshow of public sector pay is breathtaking. It achieves nothing, in the overall scheme of things, but it panders to the gaze of our vengeful consumer-culture.
Really, that's all it's designed to do.
There's certainly a discussion to be had over the size of our public sector, but the government have yet to suggest any way of restructuring it. Instead they'll just insist on more blanket pay cuts, to which our tame, oh-so-part of the establishment Unions will eventually agree, once they're done flexing their muscles.
And so, if today's palaver won't make any difference in the long term, it's wrong to begrudge it. We forget the idea of social capital, of some jobs having more worth than market values suggest. Yes, the thought of overpaid administrative civil-servants feeling aggrieved at their lot is irredeemably ugly, but it's not entirely about them.
The people on strike were also nurses, teachers, and firemen; these people certainly aren't conspicuously well-off, and they've already taken a cut once. Yes, they have a relatively privileged position. But then, they're responsible for caring for our sick, educating our children, and running into burning buildings when we're running out; if they're paid more than a marketing analyst or IT guy, then maybe that's as it should be. Withdrawing their labour made them feel important; it made them feel like they mattered, in a country that no longer seems to give a shit what they do. If that's all that the Day of Action achieved, it's not nothing.
*Which is clearly unjustifiable. Except for the Gardaí, obviously.
** Someone earning €36,000 lost more money - in absolute terms, not percentages - from their take home pay than someone earning €45,000. Someone on €38,000 paid the same percentage as someone on €120,000. If you earned €26,500, you had to pay twice as much as someone earning €500 more. Don't parrot "Share the pain" or tell me that's not appalling.
*** 1.3 billion has been bandied around, almost certainly as a gross figure. Half of that (say) would have gone back to the government in income tax and levies anyway, so actual savings are €650,000. Take into account the resultant fall in spending, the fall in VAT receipts, and the multiplier effect and all that malarkey, and you can probably (at least) cut that in half again. You're looking at about €300m saving, which is more or less the amount thrown away in the average Public Private Partnership.
Oh look, that's twice I've mentioned PPPs. Funny that.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
21:12
3 Comments:
I support the public sector workers' right to strike, though they have jumped the gun by not waiting till after the budget. Between now and the budget the unions should concentrate on negotiating better ways to save money than across-the-board paycuts. I appreciate that public sector workers were given big loans on the strength of their secure well paid jobs and many are now struggling with huge mortgages.
I don't care whether striking workers spend their time manning the picket lines or shopping. But I cannot stomach the idea of them rushing north to take advantage of the exchange rates and lower VAT. Anyone who is concerned about the flatlining Irish economy (and let's face it, who isn't?) should think twice about shopping in the north - I tweeted about this very point yesterday, before the strike.
The revenue being lost by shops in the Republic is threatening jobs here, and, by implication, threatening tax revenues. The Govt is also losing out on VAT receipts. It's a simple equation - the less money going into Govt coffers, the more of a struggle it is to pay public sector workers.
Talk about shooting themselves in the foot. To coin a phrase - it's the economy, stupid.
Oof, good writing.
Unfortunately our Labour Party is and has been oh-so-part of our political establishment for too long, and they view the electorate as those with and those without morgages - the same as FF/FG. I'm sure they've forgotten what trade unions are by this stage.
I am a public service working and I am tired of the play off between government and the unions.
I am a senior manager in education, working 60 hours a week get paid for 40 but dont mind because I chose to return to Ireland, I chose to do this job and I have to accept the good and the bad. I personally never experienced the celtic tiger, still rent a home and am a union member since I joined education in 1992.
However I am horrified to discover the union does little to support management if a conflict arises and I now wonder why stay in this union, why not just resign and go to work and ignore the strikes. The thought of crossing a picket line really pulls at my conscience and I now wonder what are my choices, continue to support an action I did not vote for and loose more pay. I have no intention of ever shopping in the North and we all agree cuts are necessary so where do this circus that we call social partnership leave the likes of me?
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