What's in a day?
AN ICTU March and the Irish Ferries controversy meant that unions were top of the news.
Why didn't they hold the march at the weekend? That was the question on everyone lips' in the media "debate" about ICTU's national day of protest. It brought to mind another question: Are people really so stupid that they have to ask?
Meejit doubts it. Everyone could surely answer: a march that takes people out of their workplaces is meant to concentrate Government and employers' minds about the threat to business as usual. That answer snuck in here or there – a Liveline caller delighted to be "back on the streets where we belong", a snooty Irish Times editorial complaining of "lost productivity" – but the organisers were reticent about offering it clearly, so the stupid question kept being repeated.
If Ireland's industrial-relations law ensures that trade unionists have to be evasive or dishonest to avoid the danger of prosecution for certain actions, then the law is an ass. But you decide if David Begg of ICTU was being evasive or just dopey when, last Friday morning, he answered a radio listener's question about whether the protest could have been held on a Sunday.
"I suppose it could have been, to be fair," Begg replied. "There was no particular scientific reason behind the Friday. It could have been any day. I accept the point." Does he protest too much? Or not half enough?
Stickin' with the union
Begg wasn't the only one who seemed strangely uninformed about why unions might act and to what effect. Even fairly sympathetic pundits – such as the powerful troika of Olivia O'Leary, Michael O'Regan and Fergus Finlay, who were Pat Kenny's guests on the radio – could see the Irish Ferries issue only in terms of what regulation the State, aka "we", could impose on the workings of the free market.
The pleas of Begg and his like rarely go beyond "sending a message to Government that something needs to be done" etc, so it can be hard to remember that workers' power goes beyond waving message-bearing placards. The history of trade-union advances is not simply one of sending messages, but of taking actions. Here in Ireland and around the world, crucial reforms in wages and working hours were achieved not just with political weight but with strikes and militancy when and where it counted.
The achievements of two decades of social partnership and the recent legacy of reform by EU diktat have helped the corporate media to erase that fighting history. We're especially naive about Europe. However, if the EU is occasionally a progressive force, it's not because it has a soft heart behind its tough neoliberal exterior, or even because a few social-democrats sometimes hold power there, but because workers at the European centre organised and made tough demands on their bosses and states, sending a clear industrial threat, not just a "message".
A fight that's only starting
Management at Irish Ferries still has friends in the media, though they've gone a bit quiet now. The latest Sunday Independent largely ignored the march and the wider issue (instead dancing joyously, if not always accurately, on what it hopes is Frank Connolly's grave). The silence is down to a combination of the company's tactics, clearly an embarrassment, and the sound journalistic principle that 100,000 potential readers can't be wrong. (The Irish Times did bravely clutch at straws with the calculation that this amounted to "only about five per cent" of the workforce, and Kathy Sheridan's observation that "the march was characterised by men, union men of the determined-looking, burly kind" – in other words, Not Our Class, Dear.)
The right's broader argument now depends on naturalising neoliberal "progress", including outsourcing. That's the way the global economy works, we keep hearing, as we're exhorted to learn our competitive lessons. The good news is there's nothing natural about it: South America is rejecting such shibboleths, country by country, and the fate of the EU Constitution shows that voters closer to home recognise that how we organise the economy is still worth fighting over, that it's not out of our hands.