Organised Workers have had enough!
The Communist Party of Ireland welcomes the clear mandate from public sector workers for industrial action over pay and conditions in the public sector.
Unions across the public sector have been returning massive ballot results in favour of industrial action demonstrating that public sector workers are fed up with this Government prioritising business interests over those of working people.
Communist Party activists, alongside fellow trade unionists, have been engaged in hundreds of thousands of conversations across the public sector to help deliver these results.
The backdrop to these ballots is a pay deal that has run out, constant delays on implementing workers rights like pay transparency, the EU Directive on Adequate Minimum Wages and the living wage, give aways to business while placing austerity like controls on spending which damage public services.
Industrial action will commence later this month in the health service and no doubt we will see more action across the public sector. This is in addition to growing industrial action in the private sector where employers continue to refuse to recognise trade unions and make workers redundant virtually at will.
It is clear that the best way for workers to defend themselves in an increasingly hostile economy is to be organised in a trade union and be engaged in collective struggle.
The Industrial Committee of the Communist Party of Ireland encourages the labour movement to remain strong on the following items:
- There must be a real pay increase for members protecting workers and their families against inflation.
- Unmet commitments under the previous agreement should be honoured. The union movement must not accept a demand for industrial peace while local bargaining claims remain unresolved.
- Pay negotiations should not become a blank cheque for the Government on labour deployment, restructuring and/or change. The labour movement should consent to no changes affecting jobs, staffing levels, workloads, working locations, professional standards or established conditions without specific prior negotiation and collective agreement. Unions should demand the necessary funding for public services and an end to creeping privatisation.
- Unions need to steel themselves to challenge the inevitable arguments from the Establishment about the constraints of the government’s fiscal space. Fiscal space is not a politically neutral quantity. It is shaped by decisions about public expenditure, tax reductions, tax reliefs and which forms of income and wealth the State chooses to tax or leave untaxed.
