SIPTU faces the ultimate decision

ACROSS the wide no-mans-land between the chief executive who earns €338 an hour and the staff he no longer wants, the casualties are about to pile up as the dispute at Irish Ferries gets down and dirty.

With the Government already throwing in the towel, this is a monumental industrial relations scrap of the era-defining variety that looks likely to be won only by brute force.

To date there is no contest in the toughness stakes.

Irish Ferries, headed up by multi-millionaire chief executive Eamonn Rothwell, wins hands down.

Disguised security men with jimmy bars and bolt cutters heralding in busloads of unannounced Eastern European workers is union-busting stuff from a largely forgotten era.

Mollycoddled in decades of Social Partnership, SIPTU is a sleeping giant and has yet to show it remembers how to kick below the belt.

Every single cog of the State’s industrial relations machinery has been diligently applied and ignored by Irish Ferries.

Now SIPTU needs to prove that it still remembers how to fight.

A union more used to being waved in through the front gates of Government buildings is going to have to reach for its old picket manuals and strike fund.

Several thousand workers marching on Government buildings to listen to threats of a winter of discontent will not be enough this time.

Less than a month ago, SIPTU president Jack O’Connor told just such a march not to hang up their walking boots for they may well need them this winter.

Yesterday morning he called for another march next Friday. Whatever else he has up his sleeve will have to be something far more impressive if Irish Ferries are even going to blink an eyelid.

After all, the successful future of unions, already struggling to remain relevant, could depend on the outcome of the sea battle about to commence.

And whatever about the future of unions, there will be other casualties in this bitter battlefield.

Inconvenienced travellers, freight operators, exporters and Irish Ferries workers themselves will be the most immediately vocal.

They will all make their appeal on numerous news bulletins in the coming days.

But there are other largely silent casualties.

Not one of the 60 to 100 Eastern European agency workers bussed in by Irish Ferries this week has been heard from yet.

We know next to nothing about them, other than they are prepared to work for as little as €3.60 an hour and suddenly found themselves caught in the middle of hostilities not of their making.

According to the company they are to be “familiarised” with their new jobs and vessels until December 8 when they take over from Irish workers.

But both Irish Ferries and the agency supplying the workers - Dobson Fleet Management Limited - yesterday refused to confirm whether the new workers were even being paid for this training period.

It is the hidden voices of these workers that much of this dispute is actually all about.

These, and the thousands more behind them, simply seeking a basic living in a more fortunate land than their own.

Irish Ferries is singled out as the tipping point due to the unique nature of the trans-national business it is engaged in and the fact that Irish employment law can be bypassed by registering a ship elsewhere.

Because of that, Irish Ferries has become a unique magnifying glass through which a fatal flaw in Social Partnership has been revealed.

Unions have made it clear, by pulling out of partnership, that it is a process not worth being in if it can’t protect workers’ rights.

But Social Partnership can protect those rights - as soon as the Government moves to improve employment protection measures as it has earnestly promised to do.

The problem for the workers in Irish Ferries is that the unique nature of seafaring means their own situation is very different from most other employment sectors.

With the Taoiseach adamant that the Government can do nothing more about this dispute, a hard truth is emerging.

If Social Partnership is to survive, it will have to be at the expense of the workers in Irish Ferries and vice-versa.

But if SIPTU lets management at Irish Ferries win this battle in order to save Social Partnership in the long term, it may be signing its own death warrant.