The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Eoghan Harris proposes a programme to help ‘poorly paid private sector workers’? That’d be nice. July 20, 2011

Months back Eoghan Harris, writing in his Sunday Independent column, made the following points:

Finally as Fianna Fail fades away, Sinn Fein is steadily becoming the most formidable opposition force in the Dai and in the media. Anyone who doubts that should look up Mary Lou McDonald’s recent Dail contributions, or check out Pearse Doherty’s commanding performance on Prime Time last week.

Let me make a further prediction. Sinn Fein will soon import some of the pluralist rhetoric it uses in Northern Ireland, stop old-style Provo posturing on the Queen’s visit, take up the cause of poorly paid private sector workers, eat into Fine Gael and Labour’s vote, and finish off Fianna Fail. That’s one of the problematical legacies of having a Government with such a large majority.

For some reason that has stuck with me, you could almost say that a spectre of EH is haunting WBS. Well, let’s hope not. But anyhow, it’s worth briefly parsing out.

Let’s pass over the seeming inability of the Sunday Independent typesetting system to use fada’s and consider something interesting in his – no doubt intentionally – provocative statements above.

Consider a key line: take up the cause of poorly paid private sector workers.

This is one that resonates particularly strongly with me.

Harris has become very adept at telling people what’s wrong, but he seems curiously incapable of working out a solution. Or rather, one suspects, that the solution wouldn’t be at all to his liking, because for all the rhetoric there are a few easy steps that would rectify at least part of the situation of us poorly paid private sector workers.

Here’s one or two. Or five.

- Increase the provision of public holidays for all workers and incorporate some of the public sector holidays into them. So instead of having the European average, or there or there abouts, argue for 25 days ex public holidays as the base line for workers holidays. All workers. Everywhere.

Codify the Christmas holidays, and Easter. For those enterprises that can’t do without them at those two periods allow their workers the time off elsewhere in the year.And bump up those public holidays from 9 to… well, say 10 at the moment with a programme to boost that up to 15 by the end of the decade. Why not? Austria manages fine on 22 days paid annual leave and 13 paid holidays. Finland and Denmark have 25 paid days annual leave while they both have 9 paid holidays. Sweden only allocates 25 days paid holiday but across the year are other ‘de facto’ holiday days which are analogous to our public holidays.

And put in some sort of bar on those in the private sector taking more. Tax ‘em until they extend greater numbers of holidays to their workers at which point all can benefit. Because why should a boss get more holidays than their workforce? C’mon, we’re talking equity here.

As a tangent there’s an excellent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, ‘No-Vacation Nation’ by Rebecca Ray and John Schmitt from 2007 which examines the situation in the United States where, alone of ‘advanced economies’ employers aren’t legally mandated to give any paid vacation at all and where consequently up to 22 million workers have no provision for vacations, while a further cohort in the labour force where nominally there is vacation provision won’t or can’t take it because it is frowned upon, if not actively discouraged. Given the stats on productivity there’s no evidence that this has improved the US economic ranking as against other countries. It surely puts the more Boston than Berlin rhetoric into a new light when you consider the holiday allocation of those using it…

- Argue for a genuine universal health service. It’s not difficult. Let’s go for increased taxation so that all workers can have access to a high quality health service, free at point of access etc.

- Argue for a universal pension provision for all workers, public or private with a top up scheme for those as want it. But tax the top up scheme and remove tax breaks to workers who engage with it. So that at the end of working lives the vast majority of us wind up with reasonable, no – better than reasonable – pension provision but pensions that are broadly speaking similar to each other.

- Support the rights of all workers in the private sector, whatever the commercial entity they work for, whether Irish or other, to unionize and underscore the idea that unions once established acquire rights to representation right up to board level. Simple one that, but as we know there are swathes of the workforce who find themselves in companies that don’t allow that, and there’s the worrying trend of companies which arrive on our shores not having to engage with unions.

- Raise the minimum wage and extend and expand the range of JLCs to ultimately incorporate all working areas in the economy. Why not? We hear on a continual basis how public sector workers work can be codified in such a way. So let’s apply that to the private sector and ensure that no worker public or private is paid less than they should be and start to work for seeing that they’re paid more.

Those five issues alone would change the lives of many working people today. For the better.

Utopian? Well, hardly. Most of those measures are either in place in other states or are extensions of what we already have. Intrusive to the free market? They surely are. But given how intrusive the free market has been to the rest of us as citizens of this state lets start to push back. Are these measures enough for me? Of course not, but a start…

But of course to do that would require the EH’s of this world moving away from the comfort zone of his usual manichaen world view to something constructive, engaged, progressive. Oh, sure, it’d demand taking on some vested interests. Possibly public sector unions, whatever they may be given that my membership is of a union that encompasses both public and private sector workers. But more obviously private sector employers.

And pointing up some of the contradictions of the present period, most obviously the one being that while we hear no end of chat about inequities, real or imagined, between public and private sector we almost never hear about inequities within the private sector or between the middle to higher reaches of the latter and the vast majority of private (and indeed public) sector workers.

That’s why, for all the rhetoric, we’ll never hear the man actually do that.

And proof of that is that for almost four years he had a political platform denied to the vast majority of his fellow citizens in this state on being appointed to the Seanad which he used not once to articulate a programme as set out above.

That’s also why we also never hear him address the point that for all the complaints about he public sector from him and holidays and such like he never once references the fact that there are large number of those in the private sector who while imposing the minimum holidays allowable under labour law on their legions of workers gift themselves extravagant holidays.

One is left with the suspicion that in truth he’s really not that interested in working people, otherwise he’d be positing something like the above.

For him they’re merely a handy tool to use to attack the public sector, and nothing more. A backdrop upon which he can project his own thoughts.

For all the teary eyed laments the fact that he’s not once articulated an actual programme for his supposedly beloved private sector workers – and by the way, I’m one, and this applies directly to me – demonstrates the hollowness of his rhetoric.