Begg: Irish Ferries row reflects wider problems

The row over outsourcing jobs to cheap foreign staff at Irish Ferries is a harbinger of wider problems in the economy, Congress general secretary David Begg warned today.

As thousands of workers marched through the streets of Dublin and towns and cities across Ireland in solidarity with the ferry workers fighting to keep their jobs, Mr Begg said the turnout showed there was a threshold of decency below which people were not prepared to let anyone be dragged.

But he said widespread employment of people from other countries on pay well below the going rates in Ireland had led to a downward pressure on wages, and a race to the bottom was underway.

“The bottom line is that the blame for this state of affairs does not lie with migrant workers.

“They and Irish workers are the victims,” he said.

“The blame lies with Irish employers and the Government, for their failure to enforce and uphold people’s rights – that is why we are marching today.

“Let me also state quite clearly that this is not a march against migrant workers and migrant labour in general.

“The Congress banner at the head of today’s march puts the case quite emphatically: Equal Rights for All Workers,” he said.

Mr Begg blamed the Government and the business community for introducing an open market for labour without sufficient regulation, which had led to the exploitation of workers.

“We have choices to make. An open labour market and minimalist regulation are mutually exclusive options.

“We can only prevent exploitation, social dumping and a race to the bottom if we have the employment standards and enforcement capability to stop it.

“This will require a complete reversal of the policy approach that has governed our labour market up to now,” he said.

He called the proposed EU directive for an internal market in services an assault on the European social model and demanded it must be defeated in the European Parliament in February.

As the national day of protest got underway, Labour Party employment spokesman Brendan Howlin said the debate over Irish Ferries – in which the company planned to replace 543 seafarers with cheaper foreign agency staff – was a struggle for decent wages everywhere in the country’s economy.

“This is a line in the sand,” he said.

“Ireland will either build its future as a high wage economy with skills that are valued, or we face a dismal future with an economy based on minimum wages and poor conditions, competing not with the advanced countries of Northern Europe but with the developing countries of North Africa and Asia.”