The eyes - watch the eyes. Bureaucracy sell out again

On 3^rd January SIPTU shop stewards agreed to a €20 million cost-cutting programme being sought by Aer Lingus management. Aer Lingus Branch Organiser Teresa Brannick said: "We are committed to the process, which has already identified some €10 million in savings in the areas where SIPTU has members."

Yet in October, when Aer Lingus management demanded the cuts and imposed a freeze on pay increases agreed under the ‘Towards 2016’ partnership deal,” SIPTU National Industrial Secretary Michael Halpenny had said:

“Aer Lingus has sunk to a new low … management has reneged on both local and national agreements between the Social Partners under T2016. Further, it is in breach of commitments entered into prior to privatisation ... Our members are not going to succumb to this kind of blackmail…they are entitled to respect as workers and not have to endure these attempts by management to bully them into submission.”

So how did we get from this sort of forthright opposition to the January collapse? The case is a textbook in bureaucratic manoeuvring – talk tough, threaten action, keep on the move and never left the left hand know what the right is doing.

So the first step was to ‘consult with other unions’ and promise members that industrial action ‘was not ruled out’. Aer Lingus were so overcome that they issued sacking notice to temporary staff and called for contract changes and wage cuts for those remaining.

In response the union balloted for strike action. “The justification for this relentless attack on the living standards of workers on, or near the average industrial wage, is that Aer Lingus rates are ‘not competitive’ in aviation sector terms. The methodology on which this claim is made has never been disclosed …” In other words the attack could be justified if the airline could prove it needed to be more competitive!

By this time the National Implementation Board (NIB) – SIPTU and ICTU officials in partnership with bosses and government – were stepping in to resolve the dispute and by mid-November had issued a report that called for the suspension of strike action wothout any guarantees from management and organised an independent report into Aer Lingus claims of financial misery. In time the report concluded that yes – if Aer Lingus could cut costs then it would make more profits.

That was enough for SIPTU. They agreed to ‘suspend’ strike action. "We expect the airline to involve itself in the process in good faith. Our objective in this process is to ensure an alternative solution can be explored which does not involve reducing our members’ pay and conditions of employment," said SIPTU National Industrial Secretary, Michael Halpenny. In other words – we will help organise the cuts!

Despite constant threats by the airline the unions could not be forced into opposition. What we got was militant bluster and practical collaboration. The union threatened action, writing to Congress seeking an all-out picket, while continuing with the process established by the National Implementation board to seek alternative ways of achieving the company’s objectives.

The success of this strategy does not lie in the mesmeric powers of the bureaucracy or the inability of workers to understand the process of betrayal. It rests securely on decades of betrayal that have demoralised union militants. Unwilling to enter battles where they will be isolated and stabbed in the back by their own leaders, they look for what appears the least worst option. In this case they were promised they could keep their current pay rates – as long as they agreed speedup and redundancy to the tune of 4000 euro per worker to pay for the company’s self-sacrifice!

It’s a pattern that has been repeated across public service, with the latest benchmarking report offering pay increases of 0%, an effective pay cut. There will be no cut in demands for speedup and job cuts. The hypnotic powers of the bureaucracy will in future be tested to the limit.

A slip of the tongue – No Irish need apply on Aer Lingus Belfast route.

On December 13th Aer Lingus decided that their standard greeting of: “Go Mbeannai Dia Daoibh, ta failte romhaibhar bord na heitilte seo,” would not be used on Belfast routes “to avoid causing offence”. Belfast becomes the only city on the globe where the greeting is not deployed. This seemingly minor shift, this exception, along with the earlier disputes about the new Belfast route, tells us a lot about the current role of the Irish bourgeois.

It is when one asks why this decision was taken that one begins to gain an insight into the strange world of post St Andrews, post-settlement Ireland. What we are observing is what the CIA call “blowback” – the strange and unintended consequences of an initial decision. In this case the blowback is the astounding (only in the sense of its speed) growth of 26 county nationalism. The Irish bourgeoisie believe that the national question has been settled by the excision of the 6 north-eastern counties and are unable to disguise their relief and luxuriate in their ability to express freely their real faith in a shrunken and parochial dependency they now call Ireland. They are only matched in that belief by their social partners in the Trade Union bureaucracy who long ago went from being an obstacle to the unity of Irish workers to being facilitators of that division. Their idea of opposing Aer Lingus was to firstly support the privatisation that gave them free rein and then to oppose the new conditions in Belfast by supporting Ryanair!

It is hardly surprising that Aer Lingus, for so long the flagship of Irish attempts to construct an independent capitalist economy and now the flagship of capitulation to globalisation, deregulation and privatisation, should be to the fore in this new definition of nationalism, first declaring Belfast to be a foreign city, then forcing lower conditions of service on staff based in the North and, on the day of the ‘No Irish’ announcement, hailing the Belfast routes as the first step to establish the company as a major player on the international market!

The darker dimension to this new nationalism becomes evident when one asks why an Irish greeting would be offensive. No-one would be offended by a French phrase on Air France or a German phrase on Lufthansa. The offence in this case would be to loyalism because, from the loyalist viewpoint, the present settlement is not based on any form of equality, but on the assertion of loyalist supremacy and the denial that expressions of Irish culture have any legitimacy within the Northern colony. What the representatives of the Irish bourgeoisie are saying with this decision is that they have no problem with the anti-Irish bigots. The bigots don’t even have to complain. The Irish bourgeois have bought the whole heap – not just partition or the British occupation, but the demands of bigotry and discrimination within the statelet.

This is bad news for Sinn Fein. Not only is there no Irish Language Act to protect language rights in the North – something they had already accepted in the St. Andrews deal. Now there is unlikely to even be the compensation that they expected to gain in the form of a language commissioner. In the longer run it is very bad news for the nationalist working class, when the bigots realise the limited constraints there are on their bigotry they will go to town in an attempt to turn back the clock to the days of fullblown Orange supremacy.

But of course the Sinn Fein leadership knew all this long ago. 10 years ago, at the start of the current process, they led a language movement in Queens University and Irish signs were erected in the Students union. The signs were removed following unionist protest and a deal negotiated where bigger grants were given to the language movement. When we realise that the signs were bi-lingual we can see the depths of unionist bigotry and the early signs that equality was not on the agenda – only a hand-out in compensation.

Even the handouts are drying up now.