Besiege the Government – Not the Workers

30/03/10

For some time now the Dublin government and its allies in the corporate media have been engaged in a sustained and concerted campaign both to divide workers and to heap the blame for the capitalist recession on the shoulders of those employed in the public sector.

Not only have the lowest paid workers in the public sector suffered cumulative pay cuts of 13 per cent, they have also faced the vitriol of the right-wing press.

The war being waged on workers was escalated last week as members of the CPSU union at the Passport Office on Dublin’s Molesworth Street, involved in an industrial dispute over pay cuts, became the target of an increasingly reactionary media. The workers concerned have been accused of “anarchy and subversion” and have faced hostile crowds whipped up by a media frenzy that considers the lowest paid workers in the Twenty-Six County state to be fair game. The work to rule at the Passport Office, part of a wider campaign of industrial action by civil service unions against the public sector pay cuts, has been in operation for several months. It involves weekly half-day office closures alongside a ban on answering telephones for a portion of the day.

Yet it seems that the establishment politicians and their media cheerleaders consider even this very mild form of industrial action to be act of subversion. The sickening double standards on display will not be lost on those struggling to survive the recession. In the same week, the Dublin Docklands Development Authority was exposed as just another play thing of the bankers and developers who have bankrolled Fianna Fáil for decades. The losses at the authority represent yet another multi-million euro gambling tab, which will be picked up by the taxpayers in the Twenty-Six Counties.

The venom directed at workers, many of whom earn just €25,000 [£22,300] per year, has also deflected attention away from the fact that billions of euro in tax-payers’ money continues to be poured into the large black hole that is Anglo-Irish Bank. Earlier this month, AIB recorded losses of €12 billion [£10.7 billion] and claimed it would require a further state bail-out of €6 billion [£5.3 billion] to remain afloat. Notwithstanding the state-owned bank’s zombie status and the clear ineptitude of its senior executives, the Dublin government has justified pay rises for the very same senior executives. These are the same people who are responsible for the criminally reckless lending practices that inflated the property bubble. At the same time, threats were being issued to dock the pay of low paid members of the CPSU unless they called off their low-level industrial action.

The dispute at the Passport Office escalated last week following a management decision to issue a press notice that the office would be closed on Friday, but which deliberately neglected to inform the public that it would re-open the following Monday. This statement was widely reported in the media and led to hundreds of people queuing outside the Passport Office on a number of consecutive days. Deputy general secretary of the CPSU Eoin Ronayne denounced the management action and said, “it was sheer madness to scare the public into a panic when there was no need as the office will be open for business again as usual on Monday.”

Ronayne described the action of management, which led to the chaotic scenes, as “dangerous and, frankly, Machiavellian”.

Meanwhile, delegates to last weekend’s CPSU conference voted unanimously in favour of strike action in the event that on-going talks with the Dublin government over pay cuts fail. However, it should be remembered that the Dublin government’s negotiation with unions is premised upon a so-called transformation of the public sector. The McCarthy Report, which has become an article of faith in Dublin government thinking, recommended a “transformation” of the public sector; one that called for the slashing of 17,000 jobs and the privatisation of many of its elements.

Public anger at this time is entirely justified, however, last week, it was widely misdirected. It is low paid workers that have borne the brunt of a savage programme of cuts imposed by a Fianna Fáil/Green Party government that has cunningly attempted to pit workers against one another and disgracefully placed the burden of the recession on the lowest paid and most vulnerable in society.

Public sector workers are not responsible for the current recession, nor are they are responsible for the fact that unemployment has reached over 400,000 in the Twenty-Six Counties. They have not cut funding to local communities that has resulted in the closure of vital community projects and facilities. They did not preside over the criminal give away of our natural resources to multinational corporations, and it is not they who are shovelling billions of euro into a failed private banking system.

The ultimate responsibility for this mess lies with those who sit but a stones throw from the Passport Office on Molesworth Street. It is the political establishment, currently waging war on the working class, who should be held to account, and it is they who should be driven from office. It is time to besiege the government and stand in solidarity with the workers.