Claiming Our Future petition to save minimum wage

Claiming Our Future this morning launched an emergency petition to save the minimum wage. Their initial aim is to collect 5000 signatures in 72 hours. You can add your name here. The full text of their appeal is below.

As we speak, the government is rapidly moving to ram through a serious cut to the national minimum wage. The proposed cut would slash €40 a week from the household budgets of tens of thousands of working families across Ireland -- families that are already struggling to make ends meet. The government is attempting to ram the cut through obscure legal backchanels, and the decision could be made as early as the end of this week.

Economists and basic common sense tell us there is no need for this cut -- and even the IMF agrees! This is just one more attempt to force the most vulnerable people of Ireland to pay the price for greed and incompetence at the top. Enough is enough -- it's time to draw a line.

That's why the Claiming Our Future community is launching an emergency petition to save the minimum wage. Our initial goal is to collect 5,000 signatures in 72 hours.  Your signature and comments will be sent to your TD and publicly presented to the Dáil by a delegation of minimum wage workers before the vote on the cuts. Please add your name right away here: www.claimingourfuture.ie

This is clearly a historic week, and the list of cherished services threatened by the government's new budget is too long to count. In the midst of all the bad news and the European intervention, it would be easy to shake our heads and retreat. But we must not give up hope.

Claiming Our Future was founded on the belief that where the institutions have failed us, the people ourselves can succeed. Never was that idea more tested -- or more needed -- than today. We can't reverse everything that's happened all at once, but we can still fight for what's right.

In difficult times, we know it's right to support working families, not to pull the rug out from under them. The government knows the minimum wage cut is unnecessary and unrelated to the budget crisis, and that's exactly why they're trying to jam it through obscure legal back-channels.

They're hoping we just won't notice. So this emergency petition is our chance to show that the peope have noticed -- and we have drawn our line.
Please add your name today at: www.claimingourfuture.ie

With hope,

The Claiming our Future team