Workers Solidarity Movement

Noel Atkins and Pat Phelan, Waterford Crystal workers and Unite Shop Stewards, travelled to Cork last night to speak out against the attempted closure of the plant. They spoke from the heart as workers tossed on the scrap heap after decades of service.

Dublin Bus is slated to see huge cuts in both staff and services. As many as 290 workers and 100 buses will be cut. This means fewer routes and less frequent service. If the Dublin Bus workers go on strike, it will mean an inconvenience for a few days. However, if they take action and force the company to back down, it will in the long run save us all time and money and will help the environment. It will also serve as a message to the politicians. If they want cuts, they can start by tightening the belts at the top, not the bottom. The politicians are giving bailouts to bankers while they hand out cuts to workers and commuters. It's clear where the money to support public services should come from. It should come from the people who created the crisis!

The Education Cuts announced in October’s Budget have unleashed a wave of protest across the country. During the months of November and December approximately 120,000 people took to the streets of Dublin, Galway, Tullamore, Cork and Donegal to register their anger at the government’s attempts to make schoolchildren pay for the financial crisis. Cowen, Lenihan and O’Keefe have been left in no doubt about the level of popular opposition to these cutbacks. In addition thousands of 3rd level students have also taken to the streets and participated in marches, pickets and blockades to protest at the proposed re-introduction of fees.

The Grassroots Gathering is a twice-yearly coming together of anarchists and libertarian socialists who are active in political groups and campaigns up and down the island of Ireland. The second of 2008's Gatherings was held in Cork on 14th-16th November. The 90 or so attending, combined with the quality of the discussions, left its organisers very pleased with the weekend. It showed that there's a lot of life left in the Grassroots Gathering as a show-case for trends and thinking among Ireland's libertarian left.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett commented on the US financial crisis that “it’s only when the tide goes out that you learn who’s been swimming naked, and Wall Street now looks like a nudist beach.” Well when it comes to Ireland, the receding tide of the global economy has revealed that not only were our business and political elites swimming naked, they were engaged in a great big orgy as well.

Workers Solidarity’s Vincent O’Malley spoke to his local Citizens Information Centre about some of the obstacles facing people who have lost their jobs.

WSM member Joe King, a clerical officer in the public sector, responds to the calls for pay cuts and redundancies.

The official story is that the origins of the current crisis lie in the collapse of the US subprime mortgage market - i.e. poor people not paying their mortgages. Although this may have been the trigger event, it is not the real cause. The real cause lies in pyramids not houses. Specifically the enormous debt pyramid built up by the Western countries, particularly those following the Anglo-saxon economic model - which, unfortunately for us, includes Ireland.

The financial markets have taken a hammering. Speculators (that’s a rich person’s word for ‘gambler’) lost incredible sums of borrowed cash in bets on everything from mortgage values to the possible price of wheat in 2011. Banks who lent out far more money than they actually had needed governments to step in with billions to bail them out. In some countries the state took them over.

What a farce! As the economy officially goes into recession, as electricity bills go up by 17.5%, as food bills are officially 6.4% higher than this time last year, the leaders of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions negotiate through the night and emerge bleary-eyed from the ‘social partnership’ talks with 1) a pay pause and 2) pay increases, when we eventually get them, lower than the rate of inflation. And then they have the cheek to tell us that this is “the best deal available in the current economic climate” (1). Lucky for them they’re not on performance-related pay if that’s the best they can do for their members.