Workers Solidarity Movement

Zombie developers….. Vampire bankers….. Ghost estate creators….. Black holes that swallow tens of billions of Euros…. They sound like characters from a particularly eerie Hallowe’en tale of horrors. However while they might be spooky, there’s nothing fictional about this array of characters. They stalked our land during the era of the recently-departed Celtic Tiger. But now they’ve gone to ground. They’ve disappeared, they would have us believe. And if they themselves haven’t actually physically disappeared, then their wealth most definitely has.

Like millions of others, I was absolutely delighted to see the trapped miners in the San José mine in Chile getting out alive from their stressful, claustrophobic confinement which they'd been in for almost 70 days as a result of negligence on the part of the mining companies. I could only be thrilled to see this terrible story of grief and suffering come to a happy ending and see tears exchanged for bursts of laughter. But at the same time, mixed with my joy at seeing these 33 condemned men return to life, I still had a feeling that was a mixture of revulsion and anger at the show put on by the very people who had dug what could have been these men's graves. I have no wish to be a killjoy, but when the natural euphoria that has engulfed the country calms down, a great many questions will need to be asked.

Public Private Partnerships (PPPs), as we’ve been led to believe by those who support them, are ways in which public bodies can share the costs and risk involved in providing public infrastructure such as roads, schools etc. with private sector companies.

But in recent days it has emerged that PPPs entered into for the construction of the M3 motorway and the Limerick tunnel are set to land  the taxpayer with a €100 million bill over the lifetime of the contracts.

Within hours of announcing that the real cost of the Anglo bailout was going to be 30 billion plus rather than the 1.5 billion first estimated the government was revealing its plan for further cuts in our pay welfare, and public services to pay for this. The bank bailouts, not totalling 45 billion, will push the budget deficit to 32% of GDP, the government has the intention of continuing to attack the living standards of workers in Ireland until this is reduced to the 3% required by the EU.

The WSM is one of 108 organisations internationally that has signed a statement in support of today's general strike in the Spanish state.   Spain like Ireland is one of the countries where the capitalist crisis is hitting the working class hardest, unemployment has reached 20%, but in Spain unlike Ireland large sections of the working class are organising to resist the crisis.  Spain has a long history of militant anarchist unions, this statement was prepared by one of them, the CGT, in opposition to the partnership approach taken by most of the unions.  It's is preceeded by an analysis by Manu García, a member of another of the unions, the CNT, about the importance of today's general strike.

On Thursday it was William Slattery of State Street.  Today it’s the chair of Goldman Sachs International “a leading global investment banking, securities and investment management firm that provides a wide range of financial services to a substantial and diversified client base that includes corporations, financial institutions, governments and high-net-worth individuals.”  And workers and the unemployed are again the target.

William Slattery, Executive vice-president of financial services company State Street and head of its Irish operation has called for 30,000 public servants to be sacked.  Mr. Slattery made his call at a conference to discuss the implementation of the Croke Park agreement.

Minister for Finance Brian Lenihan, Taoiseach Brian Cowen and representatives of the National Treasury Management Agency have spent the time since early Tuesday afternoon boasting about their latest “successful bond auction”. 

While the dust settles and Christchurch recovers from the 7.1 earthquake, people have begun to pick up the pieces and get on with their lives. But for many working class people this is not so easy. Those most affected by ‘natural disasters’ — whether by the tsunami in the Pacific, earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and now Christchurch, NZ — are those already on the margins of despair.

Many trade union activists have known for years that “social partnership” comes at a huge price for union independence and the ability of trade unions to defend the interest of their members. The myth that government and employers on one side and workers on the other side have some form of common interest has been peddled for over twenty years.  This has resulted in a trade union movement whose leadership seems incapable of independent thought and whose membership has been browbeaten into accepting pay cuts, ‘pension levies’ and various attacks on our working conditions and living standards over the past couple of years.