I have little sympathy for the union leadership. And I’m a union member. So why do I have little sympathy? Well, one could query how it was that a relatively uncontroversial short term working hours plan could morph into the ‘unpaid leave’ monster that allowed both the media and the political classes (the utter hypocrisy of FF backbenchers given their stance on expenses during the negotiations for the PfG is a sight to behold – but then bait and switch has always been their forte) to initiate a series of unrelenting attacks. That this measure is reasonably widely used in the private sector appears to have escaped almost all of those doing the attacking. That the unions weren’t savvy enough to recognise that this would provide an Achilles heel to all their great plans and proposals tells us something about their intuitive ability to misread the public mood and to worsen it… radically. All it would have taken was to hammer home the message that this was a normal device used in the private sector at times like this, a device that the Irish Times itself had promoted.
No mean achievement.
Secondly I have little sympathy because this cruelly underlines the fact that the government feels that they can impose their will by fiat. Surely, the government wobbled somewhat – and to what extent might well be instructive – even in terms of negotiating. But they must have seen from the point that strike No. 2 was called off that they had the field to themselves. If the unions weren’t willing to sit it out and increase the pressure the chances were that they weren’t that serious. The unions aren’t quite irrelevant. The Green Party in particular has been eyeing them nervously, perhaps because the GP has absolutely no sense of what organised labour is about and no particular interest or sympathy towards it.
And on a side bar issue, from talking to union members I have the strong impression, backed up by some of the comments here in the wake of the first strike, that there was no great enthusiasm or appetite for continued action. The general, as distinct from particular groupings, mass of the union membership was resigned to impending cuts and – I would hazard – thought that the action might at best ameliorate the effects slightly of said cuts. This ties into the inconvenient fact that most union members also buy into the orthodoxy to a greater or lesser degree. They may, and do, feel that they are [rightly] under considerable attack from the media, that those attacks are [rightly] unfair and they have [rightly] given more than most in terms of their wages being diminished, bar those who have lost their jobs. But this brings us to my last reason for having little or no sympathy for the leadership.
While there was some slight effort initially to resile from the orthodoxy from early on the unions – generally – bought into the orthodoxy. Perhaps not intellectually, but politically and although drawing back in their negotiations the very fact they were negotiating was indicative of that. Few who cared to look could have missed the delight of the Irish Times at the news last week the unions ‘accepted’ that cuts of €1.3bn were the order of the day. And this approach was so disastrous because it meant that it ceded legitimacy to the government and the orthodoxy when the unions could have, if they had made some effort, provided support to a counter narrative. A counter narrative that is extant in other states facing similar issues and one that in this state given the woefully low level of taxation across range of areas (PRSI being a particularly glaring example – 5% as a percentage of GDP as against 12.8% in other EU-15 states, and yesterday Danny McCoy of IBEC was arguing for further cuts in it to help our beleagured – and given our low tax environment – amazingly inept in parts, private sector) could demonstrate that in contrast to the supposed lack of ability to deal with this crisis other than by cuts we haven’t even begun to address alternative revenue streams that other European states of our size consider a norm. That we are, as it were, being forced by orthodoxy to look at only one side of the equation of tax and spend, that being spend.
Indeed one could argue the the strategic goal of the unions should have been to act to put that argument front and centre before the Irish people, ahead of public sector wages, ahead of everything. Because once you accept the parameters of orthodoxy you’re lost, since then it comes down to how much is cut and not why there are cuts. And since the eschatological approach of those arguing for cuts leaves no wiggle room (look at the actuality of unpaid leave, effective 5 – 7% wage cuts, as against… er… 5 – 6% wage cuts sought by Cowen today from pay cuts). Truth is pay cuts may be less penurious than unpaid leave. But that won’t get through the filter.
And the unions still fail!
So where would such a strategy of not accepting the orthodoxy leave us in practice? Well, first up it could have take two possible routes subsequently. First a strongly antagonistic and activist line to whatever was served up in the Budget and after. Or a campaign of passive resistance, acknowledging that cuts would be imposed, refusing to accept their legitimacy and adamantly refusing to accept any further returns to the well – this latter while bowing to the relative strengths of the players would have the advantage of going with the instincts of union members while offering an opportunity to educate them and those more widely afield as to why alternatives aren’t just feasible but necessary if we value the societal compact. Neither approach would be optimal, but they would at least have the value of providing a counter narrative to the orthodoxy.
And they wouldn’t leave us in a situation where the unions had engaged in a cosmetic round of actions and negotiations where very participation and engagement on the Government’s terms is to lose the argument from the off.
As an addendum, even if this were doomed to fail from the off, how it fails is crucial…
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