Abuses have woken the sleeping dog - Protecting workers’ rights

POLITICAL catchphrases can sometimes come back to haunt the person who first uses them. Those who invent them usually just slink back into the shadows, unbruised, while they wait for their next client.

“A lot done, more to do” the self-congratulatory war cry of Bertie Ahern’s last election campaign as leader of Fianna Fáil now screams with the hollowness of an abandoned asylum. “Rise and Follow Charlie” seems beyond comment, irony-free comment at least. “The Economy Stupid” seems no more than a one-breath summation of a philosophy — Thatcherism and the veneration of the free market economy — that has destroyed or concentrated wealth. It reversed nearly a century of social progress for working-class families all around the Western world. It has, under the guise of globalisation, hit European and American middle and working classes in a way usually only seen during wartime.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s “The Best Little Country in the World to do Business” mantra is teetering on the line between valid, laudable ambition and the kind of ironic, nudge-nudge we’ll-sort-you-out chicanery that seems such an essential lubricant for the unfettered capitalism seen to such devastating affect in recent weeks.

Of course Mr Kenny intends the slogan as a very positive and empowering idea but that vigorous promotion of business values, and what a wide, uncritical sweep that phrase encompasses today, are promoted without any set of balancing protections or rights for workers. Companies who refuse to recognise collective bargaining and celebrate loudly their refusal to recognise unions are routinely grant aided by a coalition sustained by the Labour Party, ostensibly the political wing of the trade union movement. Go figure.

But, it seems, the worm is turning. The treatment of Clerys workers, the disdain shown by Dunnes Store to their workers, the idea behind zero-hour hour contracts and the exploitation involved all seem to have kicked a sleeping dog — and probably not before time either. The fact that so many pensions, in the private sector at least, have turned out to be no more valuable than a losing each-way bet at the Curragh has added to that momentum, a momentum that will increase as those who thought they had a pension contract rather than an iffy bookie’s docket reach retirement age and face life on something little more than a mite’s pittance.

This reality was recognised this weekend by Tánaiste Joan Burton when she said the “next big battle will be securing workers’ rights”. There is, nor is there likely to be, a person better placed to lead that campaign, an opportunity to turn lip service into a set of life-changing and ethical principles. Of course the usual voices will warn about how difficult recognising workers’ rights would make creating jobs. If history is a trustworthy teacher those voices will also goad workers to the kind of extremism that makes them part of the problem rather than the solution. Might it be possible this time around that everyone recognises that if protecting workers’ rights is done in a fair and reasonable way that everyone benefits ultimately? More to do indeed.