A Better, Fairer Way?

ICTU’s 10-point plan to capitulation

John McAnulty

3 March 2009

The vote for strike action presents workers with something of a dilemma.

On the one hand workers want to protest the pensions levy, the wage cuts, the cuts in public service and the contrasting reward of the crimes, thefts and bailouts among the golden circle.

On the other hand the 10-point plan drawn up by ICTU, summing up the aims of strike action, is a call for social solidarity with the crooks who sold us out and a demand that ICTU be allowed on to the committee that will bring in the levy!

Let's read the fine print. ICTU’s ten-point plan calls for:

1. Protecting Jobs & Tackling Unemployment
Workers to be guaranteed 80% of income and retraining - a slogan rendered meaningless in the context of support for slashing the wages of workers rather than guaranteeing them.

2. The Banking System & the Public Interest
The bureaucracy suggest nationalization or recapitalization, ignoring the fact that these are the methods currently used by capital to hand over public funds to the bankers and ignoring the absolute corruption of the public bodies supposed to supervise the banks.

3. Competitiveness.
Cut energy costs - again a suggestion that the government can be persuaded to support the workers when the whole aim is to plunder them.

4. The Pay Agreement
Follow the pay agreement - The bureaucracy give the game away here. They are not asking government and employers to honour the terms of the national pay agreement, but simply to follow 'inability to pay mechanisms' built into all these agreements that always meant that only workers were bound by them. ICTU are signalling their willingness to police the credit crunch on behalf of the bosses.

5. Fairness & Taxation
We have arrived at the core of the bureaucracy's plan - the workers will pay for the crisis - but the capitalists must pay their fair share! This is by far the wordiest section of the document for the simple reason that the whole history of the 'Celtic Tiger' demonstrates the impossibility of getting capital to pay its fair share - in fact the common strategy of the bureaucracy and the government was never to ask the multinationals to pay any significant taxes!

Even if many of the obstacles to taxation were to be overcome, the plain fact is that the majority of capitalist wealth is of course held as capital. Getting the capitalists to pay their fair share (in reality the full bill) would mean expropriation of capital - an idea the bureaucracy will run a mile from!

6. Restoring Consumer Confidence
This is an ‘if only’ section. If only the government and bosses would stick to the pay agreement the workers would have some money and would spend more. If only this all-out attack on the working class wasn't an attack! Yet another plea to the bosses to call back the bureaucracy to their side!

7. The Public Service ‘Pension Levy’
ICTU give absolute assurances that the working class will pay. Again they call on capital to pay its fair share and to allow them back into social partnership and to police the offensive they have already agreed in January's framework document.

8. Pensions
ICTU call for a pension protection fund - having just indicated their acceptance of a totally bogus pension levy and agreed a deal on Waterford glass that guarantees nothing for the workers. It's OK for the government and bosses to rob Peter, but they must promise to save Paul!

9. Employment Rights Legislation
The government that has just torn up the partnership agreement is asked to enforce its clauses - even though exploitation of migrant labour and bureaucratic collaboration by the union leaders has been a consistent feature of the Celtic Tiger.


10. National Recovery Bond
There is a better fairer way. The government shouldn't force us to hand over our money - we should volunteer it ourselves.

Two unstated elements of the ‘better, fairer’ way

The 10-point plan is in reality a 12-point plan. The central, unstated points are:

Social solidarity with the government, bosses and bankers.

The workers must pay for the crisis (as long as there is some tawdry cloak of fairness).


The workers have no choice about activity. They must vote for strike action no matter what way some union ballots are worded. What they must not do is go into the strike as political cannon fodder for the bureaucracy. They must put forward their own plan, diametrically opposed to that of the bureaucracy, denouncing the new superpartnership of social solidarity and making it clear that the working class won’t pay for the crisis.

Even low levels of campaign on this basis would begin to build rank and file structures. Campaigning around the strike call and building local strike committees on this basis would lay the foundation for a national worker’s movement and prevent demoralisation and despair when the union leaderships finally implement the betrayal that they spell out so clearly in a ‘better, fairer way’.

Executive budget starts to bite

As the practical implications of the Executive’s first budget begin to filter through its neo-liberal and anti-working class character becomes ever clearer. For example, last week the Social Development Minister Margaret Ritchie told her Assembly scrutiny committee the draft budget allocated to her department was completely inadequate and not sufficient to tackle homelessness or the number of people in housing stress. She revealed that the Housing Executive maintenance and upgrade budget could be slashed by fifty per cent.

Another organisation, also within the Department for Social Development, whose budget is facing cuts, is National Energy Action (NEA). It has responsibility for tackling fuel poverty. This is a particularly pressing issue in the north which has the highest level of fuel poverty in the UK. There are 154,000 households classed as fuel-poor, and each year more than 2,000 people die because of the cold. Fuel poverty also has a disproportionate impact on the elderly with over 50 per cent of cold homes occupied by older people. It is a problem which is escalating. The results from the 2006 House Condition Survey, which are out soon, are expected to say that this figure has risen to above 210,000 households. That means that 36 per cent of all households in Northern Ireland are experiencing fuel poverty - a jump of 5 percent from 2001. NEA’s director Pat Austin has described the decision to halve its budget as a "dangerous" and "draconian". The clear implication is that suffering will increase and people more people will die.

Another area to feel the squeeze has been health. Spending on the health service in the north is already the lowest in the UK, and the allocation of funds in the budget means it will fall even further behind. This is despite the fact that the population is in poorer state of health and demands on services are greater. Budget restraints mean that the Department’s new mental health strategy cannot be launched, and that the new women and children's hospital, promised for Belfast since 2000, will be further delayed.

Some of the proposals in the Executive’s budget wouldn’t seem out of place in Swift’s Modest Proposal (maybe the finance minister is hoping that more elderly people dying of cold will ease pressure on health service!). Unfortunately, Peter Robinson is no Jonathon Swift. His proposals aren’t biting satire designed to expose injustice, but his vision of how society in north should develop.

What is at the heart of this vision is inequality. So alongside the parsimonious approach to addressing health and housing needs, we have the business class being encouraged to milk the public purse for all its worth. Recent examples of this include the revelation that the fees paid to by Government departments to consultancy firms have gone up from £13m per year to just over £40m. NI Water alone has spent than £16m on consultancy fees since April.

Often the people awarding these contracts are directly linked to the companies that benefit. In one case, the Strategic Investment Board (SIB), which is overseeing the roll out of PFIs in the north, paid the company of one of its own board members more than £2m in fees for his and a colleague's services. By happy coincidence (for him) James Stewart is the chief executive of Partnerships UK plc (PUK), a company which provides public and private sector commercial expertise for public private partnerships.

These examples of the soaking of the poor and the featherbedding of the wealthy are scandalous. But they are not apparitions or mistakes. Rather, they are a direct and deliberate result of the policy, which all the parties have signed up to, of shifting the north’s economy in a neo-liberal direction. They exemplify what glib phrases such as “rebalancing the economy” or “growing the private sector” (which flow feely from the mouths of minsters) actually mean in practice. And this is just the start!