Workers of the world united

TONIGHT at the stroke of midnight, the sixth social partnership agreement comes to an end.

And as the Sustaining Progress agreement enters the realm of history so too does an extraordinary year-and-a-half for Ireland’s modern-day place in the world.

In these last few months a country still proudly melancholic about having had to send its impoverished sons and daughters overseas, has been startled by the arrival of tens of thousands of other peoples’ children from behind the defunct Iron Curtin.

Just as Paddy and Seamus talk of having built the New York skyline in decades past, Igor and Vladimir will tell their grandchildren how they once toiled on the building sites in a tough land called Ireland.

Today it is just over 18 months since Bertie Ahern ushered in a new era in European history - enlargement from a union of 15 primarily wealthy nations to 25.

In a poem specially written for the Day of Welcomes, Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney delivered a typically poignant touch.

“So on a day when newcomers appear,/ Let it be a homecoming and let us speak,/ The unstrange word, as it behoves us here, /Move lips, move minds and make new meanings flare.”

But behind the celebration a new reality had been set in train. Some telltale signs were evident immediately. On the afternoon of enlargement the towns on the German side of the Polish and Czech boarders emptied as Germans crossed over to avail of far cheaper beer - a straightforward and understandable enough principle.

But that very same principle, on a larger scale, is behind many of the migrant labour scandals which suddenly began appearing in Ireland just six months after enlargement.

The exploitation of any worker here, be they Irish or otherwise, is of course illegal. But legislation is useless if not enforced.

Those streaming in to fill the lowly jobs many here no longer wanted to accept, far from experiencing the homecoming envisaged by Heaney, found themselves in a situation more akin to slavery.

The simple reason for this appears to be the Government’s failure to act quickly to protect our new migrant workforce. Contrast, for example, the swiftness with which the first flouters of the tobacco ban were prosecuted to the slowness of the Government’s response to abuses of labour law.

There is a sense that the Government would prefer to ignore migrant labour abuse but for one thing - Social Partnership. From the very beginning, 2005 saw a year dominated like never before by migrant labour scandals. In February the Irish Examiner exposed that Polish workers on the Dublin Port Tunnel were illegally being paid half the rate of their Irish counterparts.

The following month the Gama scandal erupted. That was quickly followed by a stream of other scandals and revelations culminating with the recent events at Irish Ferries.

The plan to register its ships elsewhere in order to circumvent Irish labour law was the most blatant flouting of the spirit of the law.

It was also the straw that broke the back of Social Partnership just as the current national agreement was about to run out. The Government was left with no other choice but to face up to the implications of enlargement for labour rights here or face a future without the co-operation of the unions through partnership.

It is unfortunate and disappointing that no one in Government sought to address the issue before it became an unavoidable reality. That failure has let many migrants down and impacted poorly on the traditional good standing of the famous Irish welcome.

But workers rights have never been to the fore in the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment, relegated as they are to the junior ministry of labour affairs.

But be wary too of unions whose most strident efforts at protecting the rights of migrant workers came just before a new national agreement is about to be negotiated.

It is no coincidence that SIPTU took its biggest stand in years on the Irish Ferries dispute. Ultimately the union emerged with a good deal, but would have probably been prepared to sacrifice workers at Irish Ferries for the sake of something more in the new round of social partnership talks.

Politics is politics, after all, and when all sides get together to negotiate a new national agreement, it will be politics and the balance of power between the social partners that dictates the shape of any deal.

Given the events of recent times, though, there is a real possibility of workers rights being properly enforced for the first time as part of any agreement. So long as politics doesn’t mess it up of course.