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Together we can beat Irish Ferries
national |
worker & community struggles and protests |
opinion/analysis
Wednesday December 07, 2005 12:00 by DC - WSM
Friday’s demonstration is an opportunity for all Irish workers to show our support for and solidarity with Irish Ferries workers in their battle against job displacement and exploitation. Their fight is our fight because if the company is successful in defeating the workers’ resistance it will open the floodgates for employers throughout the economy to slash wages and attack working conditions – a process which is already well under way. Workers in Irish Ferries have shown the way in which employers’ attacks can be resisted. Their response to the attempts at bullying by management and their hired thugs was immediate and direct. They didn’t wait around but took immediate direct action to protect their livelihoods and force the management on the defensive. It was this action which forced the issue of job displacement on to the national political agenda and which forced the leadership of the trade union movement to take the issue seriously. |
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Jump To Comment: 2 1When outsourcing and downsizing occurs, there needs to be a shift of workers from the cities to the country side where organic agricultural communes are ready and available to the fellow workers, so the bosses cannot starve them into submission, which has been their traditional method of destroying the workers opposition. This means that preparative work must already be done, so the transition causes no hardship to the abused and unemployed workers from the trade union based city sites. Communes not prisions.
What is this gung-ho? Multiplied on the Galway posting. Have you not been reading the omens on Indymedia? Yesterday the executive of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions endorsed the statement of the National Implementation Body with the support of SIPTU.
A resolution based on the National Minumum Wage of €7.65, rather than €3.50, an hour for relacement seafarers is on the way.
Go back now and read everything said about the need to win this at all costs, about this being the test of what kind of a society we'll have, about 'do or die' time for the trade unions. The trade union bureaucracy has already, days before Friday, accepted the turfing out of union members and unfortunate people working for half their wages in their place. Ferries sailing without unions as the redcircling runs down.
It happened in the Independent newspaper. It could happen anywhere now. The union leaders have given the green light to the race to the bottom.
Take your workplace. Management offer big lumps with a deadline. Many or most accept. New workers are brought in on half the wages (the National Minimum Wage). The union says this is a disgrace, we'll strike, we'll blockade, we'll call the entire country out.
Management, the members, the media, trade union members all over the country say, but you had all this, you had December 9th, and YOU ACCEPTED IT IN IRISH FERRIES!
Defeat. Time for those with a head on their shoulders to regroup.