Union proposes mortgage ‘strike’

A CAMPAIGN of civil disobedience culminating in a mortgage strike has been mooted by the country’s largest nursing union as a means of forcing banks to write down the mortgages of householders in negative equity.

The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has submitted a motion proposing a campaign of community-wide resistance to negative equity to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

INMO deputy general secretary Dave Hughes said the idea was being floated because the “normal methods” of trade union protest, such as public protests, currently weren’t working and because people were afraid to take industrial action for fear of losing jobs.

“So I believe the challenge for the trade union movement, and which we are putting to Congress, is to capture that fear and turn it into a power and the power would be to have the ability to control what you pay and when you pay it, but not that you don’t pay.”

For the campaign to have any hope of success, Mr Hughes said it would, at a minimum, need 100,000 to register in support of it. This could be done online and participants could receive step-by-step instructions, beginning with a suggested list of banks in which to open alternative accounts.

This, he said, would send a signal to the markets that the campaign had support.

The next step would be for participants to redirect payment of wages into the new bank accounts, to stop the original bank “raiding savings” if mortgage payments fell into arrears.

The final step, if the banks failed to react, would be a mortgage strike.

However, for the campaign to work, it would need the support of those with sound mortgages. Mr Hughes said he believed these mortgage holders would sign up on the basis that ultimately, they would end up paying anyway for distressed mortgages.

“You would have to persuade people that this is in everyone’s interest… that if we don’t act, at some point down the line, those with good mortgages will end up paying anyway for those with distressed mortgages through increased interest rates,” Mr Hughes said.

Congress is due to decide in July whether to support the INMO proposal which also calls for a social charter guaranteeing the right to accommodation of all citizens.