Low paid workers and the meaning of 'exploitation'

The advent of the present economic crisis has provided a convenient opportunity for the corporate and political elite to erode the pay and conditions of the most vulnerable sections of the Irish workforce. But this exploitation is of course nothing new. As Fran P Bowman reminds us, even when the Celtic Tiger was in full swing, migrant workers in particular were subjected to most appalling treatment by unscrupulous employers.

When the government argued for the reduction of the National Minimum Wage (NMW) from €8.65 to €7.65 during the Dáil Debate on the "Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest" on 9 December 2010, Minister Brian Lenihan said:

Anyone already working under a contract of employment that sets wages at or above the national minimum wage is entitled to continue to be paid those wages unless otherwise agreed between both the employer and the employee concerned.

The drastic reduction of the NMW had nothing to do with any "financial emergency" and even less with the "public interest", unless the "public interest" – or its proxy "the national interest" - is equated with those of employers, speculators, bankers, developers, and their political lackeys. The reduction in the NMW is part of the National Recovery Plan 2011-2014, which will introduce structural reforms to the labour market in order to "remove barriers to employment creation". So what constituted "exploitation" last year - namely being paid less than €8.65 per hour - won't be considered "exploitation" now. This is the normal usage of the term "exploitation". Marx used it in a very different way. Without exploitation (the difference between what workers are paid and the value that they produce) profits would not be possible. The economic recovery, which entails solely the recovery of profit, will be based on increasing the rate of exploitation of those workers who are already the most poorly paid.

But in this article I would like to adopt a slightly different focus. The assurances of the Minister were nothing but lies on top of a pile of lies and any promise made to workers can never be taken at face value. We do not know how many workers in Ireland on the old NMW have been "let go" to hire workers on the new NMW, or how many have been bullied into accepting a wage cut of at least €40 per week. We only get to know about employers' abuses when workers make a stand.

On 17 February, five female SIPTU members from Lithuania and Poland mounted a picket outside the Davenport Hotel in Dublin after being taken off the roster for refusing to accept a non-agreed wage cut. As soon as the new NMW came into force on 1 February, Davenport Hotel management rushed in new contracts, expecting that the workers would just sign them. Five of them refused to agree to having €40 per week taken from them and were taken off the roster. According to SIPTU, over 300,000 workers covered by Employment Regulation Orders (which establish minimum rates of pay) could potentially have their wages cut due to this new legislation (SIPTU 17 Feb). So, the strike at Davenport hotel is full of significance.

This labour conflict proves that declarations of good intentions on the part of the establishment have no value for workers and their organisations. In the historical period that we are living through, and after the government and employers decided to do away with social partnership, the defence of old living conditions and the building of a powerful labour movement to make it possible depend entirely on a return to a confrontational relationship between labour and capital. Assurances from those who want to increase the rate of exploitation mean nothing. As Marx said in Capital, when there is a clash between the equivalent right of employers to make profit and that of workers to make a living, then force decides.

The story behind the labour conflict at the Davenport hotel is not new and has no direct relationship with the current economic crisis. When employers feel strong enough, they break any law or any agreement.

In January 2006, seventeen mushroom pickers walked out of their jobs in a mushroom farm in Kilnaleck, Co Cavan, and claimed they had been working between 80 and 100 hours per week for around €250, with no entitlement to holidays or days off. A SIPTU organiser in Cavan said that it was one of the worst cases she had ever come across and that every single piece of labour legislation had been broken.

During 2006, the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland (MRCI) and SIPTU discovered that sweatshop conditions were widespread and that not a single mushroom farm fully complied with the Employment Regulation Order for Agricultural Workers. A question that some labour activists and workers in mushroom farms asked insistently was how it was possible that the government knew about the generalised "exploitation" in the mushroom industry and yet was doing nothing to stop it. Perhaps we should also ask ourselves how is it possible that the Davenport Hotel has managed to secure an interim injunction restricting the number of pickets outside the premises.

During the SIPTU and MRCI campaign in the mushroom industry between 2006 and 2007, the government gave assurances that the law would be implemented but in practice it tried to put as many obstacles in the way as possible to avoid the implementation of the law on mushroom farms. Labour inspections could not find legal breaches unless workers came up with hard evidence, but for the workers it was difficult to produce this due to the obstruction of employers.

The state had the power to demand compliance to growers under the threat of stopping grant aid. So, SIPTU demanded and obtained verbal assurances from the Department of Agriculture and Food (DAF) that grant aid to mushroom growers would be conditional on compliance. SIPTU, however, was not in a position to check this. MRCI, unlike SIPTU, was in touch with a large number of mushroom workers on different farms and, therefore, in a position to check whether growers receiving grant aid were complying with the law. But in order to be able to do that, it was necessary to know who was getting grant aid. For DAF that was confidential information and it stubbornly refused to disclose the identities of those mushroom growers getting grant aid, even after MRCI applied for a second time for the names under the Freedom of Information Act. However, the SIPTU campaign in the mushroom industry, even if a top-down one and with no worker input, managed to clean up the worst forms of "exploitation" in mushrooms farms.

The mainstream labour movement in Ireland has so far avoided confrontation with the government and employers, and the few radical words that have come from union and labour leaders have been aimed at a return to the old regime of social partnership. Fine Gael's assurances that it will restore the NMW to the old rate should not be taken at face value. This neoliberal party has promised further and more drastic cuts, which they will implement because state debt default is the most likely outcome within the current economic paradigm.

The lesson that we must learn from the struggle of Davenport Hotel workers is that the outcome of the struggle between the need of employers to make profits and the need of workers to satisfy their human needs won't be decided at the table of negotiation or the High Court.

Image top via OLT-Dessins on Flickr.

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