Workers Solidarity Movement

Bus Eireann staff are set to exert their collective rights and strike from the 20th February in an indefinite industrial action in order to secure their pay and conditions. The strike action follows Bus Éireann’s acting chief executive officer Ray Hernan saying the company wanted to reduce its cost base by €30 million per year, with payroll costs accounting for 40 per cent of that reduction.

Listening to Morning Ireland on regime radio on the 7th of November we were surprised to hear the word lock out used only in the context of pupils being locked out of schools. The term has been carefully avoided when it comes to the teachers locked out by their employers.]

Thousands of teachers are locked out of their place of work that morning despite turning up as normal. The ASTI twitter account has sent many photos of teachers standing outside closed schools around the country, some 60% of secondary schools are closed.

The shutdown of Dublin bus services begins prematurely at 21.00 tonight thanks to management's refusal to trust the workers to wind down the service ahead of tomorrows two day strike, the first of three scheduled. As our name suggests Solidarity Times stands in solidarity with the bus workers, just as we were in solidarity with the LUAS strikes.

In both strikes a media looking for angles to attack the workers on choose the relative size of the pay claims they were making. 21% sounds big but the period covered, 2008 to 2019, is actually 11 years. But workers in Dublin need big pay increases and contrary to what RTE might tell you this isn’t a bad thing for most of us, quite the opposite.

Irish billionaire capitalist Michael O'Leary has launched an online petition asking you to back a capitalist and state move against French air traffic control (ATC) unions. It's called 'Keep Europes Skies Open'.

The end goal of such a move would be to outlaw strikes through state legislation, force unions to submit to binding state backed arbitration and promote the use of scab labour to undermine workers striking for better conditions.

Michael the billionaire is hoping working class people like us can be enticed into undermining French ATC unions by encouraging us to put our holiday plans ahead of the livelihoods of French workers.

That's not going to happen Michael.

One hundred years after the vigorous labour organising of Jim Larkin, James Connolly, Rosie Hackett, and Louis Bennett in Ireland, we still remember the old labour slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all”.

But in their present structure, are trade unions nothing more than an arm of the state and of the bosses? Do unions function more to control workers rather than advance their interests? Can the major unions be reformed from within, or should we start building new ones? Are militant trade unionists ‘wreckers’, or the future of the labour movement?

Our solidarity to Cadburys workers who today begin an indefinite strike at the Coolock plant against the outsourcing of jobs.  The company is trying to destroy 17 properly paid and pensionable jobs to replace them with minimum wage ones.

Last Thursday the local branch of Dunnes stores in Gorey Co. Wexford, closed due to an injunction which was brought upon the store by banning the managing agent for the receiver of Gorey shopping center. The injunction was to close the door which leads directly to the car-park. The effect of the door was that customers bypassed the smaller shops in the shopping mall. Dunnes Stores never asked the management for permission to construct the door; it was a clear breach of the lease.
 

Could climate change become a catalysing force for radical social transformation in Ireland? Recent struggles around public transport in Ireland prompted me to think along these lines. Last weekend, Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann workers went on strike over plans by the National Transport Authority to tender out 10% of public routes to private operators. A few days earlier, SIPTU’s banner at Liberty Hall had been unfurled to state: ‘Say No to Privatisation; privatisation results in fare increase, reduced services, a threat to free travel, a bad deal for taxpayers and job cuts’. SIPTU and NBRU members and strike organisers have emphasised the damage privatisation will do to society, primarily concentrating on the loss of community services and the race to the bottom in bus drivers’ terms and conditions [1]. The striking workers deserve our support and their claims should be taken seriously. This is definitely the case when the regime media adhere to a deeply unimaginative line, loudly declaiming traffic disruption to an imagined city of angry consumers and silently accepting the hollowing out of public services [2]. At the same time, however, we also need to think about what’s not being said, about the words that don’t make it on to the papers or the banner.