Talks an irrelevant and dangerous farce

MATERIAL inequality is an ever more pressing issue.

Most of the developed world enjoys lifestyles almost unimagined in the developing world. This reality is a driving force behind escalating migration to Europe and America. Inequality is growing in the developed world too. Wealth is concentrated in ever fewer hands and, as Greece discovered this week, the power of international money is all but absolute, maybe even beyond the control of democratically elected governments.

Workers face a new, colder reality too. The middle classes have had to surrender hard-won advances and many industries, many supported by government subvention, refuse to recognise trade unions or the process of collective bargaining — principles sacrosanct among public sector employees. Job security, as it was known, is with O’Leary in the grave.

These are seismic social shifts and distort what should be a mutually beneficial relationship between employers and employees. They also make it more difficult, maybe far too dificult, to follow the traditional life path of job, home, family, educate family and dignified retirement. In recent days, two very different responses to this change came into the public square and, tragically, it is difficult to say which is more wrong-headed or divisive.

In Britain, David Cameron’s Tories, far bolder as a single-party governmnet, proposed laws that, if enacted, would make Margaret Thatcher proud. They would exacerbate social division, exploitation and isolation. Among the proposals are measures that would mean that unions would have to give two weeks notice of strike action and employers could take on temporary staff to break a strike. If these and other proposals are imposed, it is difficult to see how trade unions can have any meaningful leverage in industrial relations and workers will be ever more exposed and vulnerable.

Our Government, in an entirely different response to trade unions and employee negotiations, rejuvenated a profoundly discredited and anti-democratic process, one that could hardly be more different to the Tory proposals. The National Economic Dialogue opened and any pretence that this is not a precursor to a renewed social partnership process is simply dishonest. The social partnership fiasco, especially under the one-for-everyone-in-the-audience supervision of Bertie Ahern, was one of the great disasters to befall this country. It made promises we could not keep, spent money we did not have and drove a dangerous wedge between public and private sector workers because it meant very little to workers, or social welfare dependents, outside of the public sector. It became an auction to buy votes and ended up as a process where public servants spoke to public servants about a mutually benefical division of the spoils. It showed trade unions and populist, irresponsible politics at their very worst.

Just as Labour in Ireland and Britain face huge challenges around redefining themselves and celebrating their core values, so too does the trade union movement. If the National Economic Dialogue — a dialogue that’s probably irrelevant to the majority of workers in this society — cannot find a way to help all workers, then it will be just another dangerous farce.