Embargo: 4.30 p.m. Wednesday, 30th January.
Speech by Jack O’Connor, General President of SIPTU, at
the commemoration of the 66th anniversary of the death of
Jim Larkin, Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, 30th January,
2013.
Comrades and Friends
We are here today to commemorate the life of Jim Larkin, the
founder of our union and of the modern Irish labour
movement.
Larkin virtually transformed the traditional,
narrow outlook of guild trade unionism into a vibrant,
modernising mass movement. In celebrating his life we are
reiterating our own commitment to the values of equality,
fraternity and solidarity for which he stood.
Remarkably, we are doing so in the context of the
extraordinary coincidence between the Centenary of the Great
Dublin Lockout and the unfolding collapse of the global
economic system caused by commercial interests whose
values reflect those of the rich and powerful elite that locked
out the workers Larkin led in 1913.
Indeed, we find ourselves in the front line, as those at the top
of the financial system in Ireland and in Europe who caused
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the crisis in the first place are systematically exploiting the
opportunity it presents to re-calibrate the relationship between
Capital and Labour across the continent.
They have blatantly set about dismantling the gains of more
than half a century of trade union struggle in order to drive
down the price of labour and social provision so that they can
compete more effectively with their contemporaries from the
hell holes of the globalised economy.
Larkin’s extraordinary personality was driven by his vision of
a better world for working people and by his unparalleled
ability to communicate that vision to others. The combination
of his Marxist analysis, personal charisma and unparalleled
determination became the catalyst that released the energy and
pent up anger of generations of the most oppressed working
class in the British Empire. Their heroic response to the
Lockout – because it was the other side which declared war
first – constituted a great deal more than the mere curtain
raiser role in the national rebellion allocated to it by some
establishment historians.
Although the epic struggle of 1913 unfolded against the
background of the Home Rule Bill of 1912, it was part of a
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mass movement that swept Europe from Bourbon Spain to
Tsarist Russia in the years before the First World War.
The 1907 dockers and carters strike in Belfast, the 1911
general transport strike in Liverpool, the Wexford Foundry
strike of the same year and the fight to defend union
recognition in Sligo in 1913 were all part of that wider
international wave of militancy. Far from simply being just a
demonstration of emerging Irish nationalist militancy the
advances made by the ITGWU between 1909 and 1913 were
an expression of the divine mission of discontent that had seen
the number of workers involved in strikes in Britain soar to
515,000 in 1910, to 962,000 in 1911 and almost 1.5 million in
1912.
Indeed, it was the support of British workers organised in the
TUC that enabled Dublin’s embattled trade unions to
withstand the employers’ counter-offensive launched by
William Martin Murphy in the summer 1913. The battles
fought out on the streets of Dublin between August 1913 and
January 1914 were social, economic and ideological, as well
as industrial. They were the nearest thing we ever had in this
country to a contest between the values of labour in Ireland
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and the outlook that would shape the country for the next
century.
Ultimately, that battle was won by William Martin Murphy
and his allies despite the heroic resistance of the working
people of this city and we have been living with the
consequences of the victory of that wealthy elite ever since.
Essentially, the core issue at the centre of the battle was the
right to engage in collective bargaining. This is critical to the
degree to which working people can influence the formulation
of economic and social policy at the level of the workplace
where the redistribution of wealth is decided. The employer’s
use of the lockout tactic, augmented by the power of the
British state machine, set about denying them the means by
which they could advance their own interests and influence
the architecture of the new Ireland. Murphy and his allies did
not succeed in smashing the labour movement but they did
ensure that the formulation of economic and social policy in
the new state would be determined exclusively in the
reflection of their interests, prioritising speculation over
innovation.
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The consequences of their triumph are now clear for all to see.
It has led us to an economic crisis which threatens our very
existence as a sovereign state for the third time in sixty years.
These were all avoidable and the risks of such short sighted
policies have been identified by many. As long ago as the
Great Depression, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt said, at
his second inaugural address in 1937 that; “We have always
known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know
now that it is bad economics.”
Indeed, it is now acknowledged even by institutions such as
the International Monetary Fund that exponentially growing
inequality camouflaged by increasingly reckless lending has
been central to the economic collapse in western developed
economies.
It is also being recognised that the decline of
trade unionism and the demise of collective bargaining has
brought this about, grossly undermining the purchasing power
of the American middle class.
It was blind obedience to the laws of the market and
pursuit of short term gain for the wealthy elite that led the
previous Irish Government into the greatest economic
crisis in the history of the state and into accepting liability
for the resulting debts of private speculators. According
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to Michael Taft of UNITE, whose figures have not been
challenged, this has resulted in Ireland carrying 42% of
the entire eurozone bank debt. We shoulder almost €9,000
of bad bank debt for every man, woman and child in the
country, compared with €192 per capita in other eurozone
states.
That is why we must break the grip of this ruling
mentality and confront the impossible burden that has
been imposed upon us before it breaks our country. The
key demand in the weeks ahead must be for a deal on
bank
debt.
All
the
complacent
assumptions
in
establishment circles that a deal on the first element, the
promissory notes, could be taken for granted now stand
exposed as a result of last week’s ECB Council Meeting.
The consequences of not getting a deal could be disastrous.
It would immediately jeopardise the prospects of emerging
from the ‘bailout’ as the financial markets have been
factoring it in since the June 29th Heads of Government
declaration last year. If we are unable to return to
borrowing on the financial markets we will have to go
back to the EU/ECB/IMF troika for another ‘bailout’. If
we get one, (which cannot be taken for granted), it would
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come with onerous conditions attached. They would
dictate the pace at which we could pay back our zombie
bank inflated national debt, and the way in which we
would
dismantle
what
remains
of
our
public
infrastructure to do it – a road that would inevitably lead
to default.
Consequently, the Government must hang tough on the
€3.1 billion promissory note. We strongly endorse the
insistence of the Minister for Communications, Energy
and Natural Resources, Pat Rabbitte, that we cannot and
must not pay it. We fully recognise that refusal to pay has
potentially enormous consequences as well, including the
possibility of the ECB withdrawing support from our
banks resulting in their inevitable collapse. That is why
securing a deal on bank debt is too important a political
battle to be left to the Government alone.
We must demonstrate massive public support for such a
deal. That is why it is critically important that as many as
possible turn out on Saturday, 9th February in support of
the Day of Action called by the Irish Congress of Trade
Unions. This is not just another demonstration - it is
crucial to the battle to convince Europe that we have
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reached the end of the line in terms of what we can
sacrifice, in terms of our own futures and that of our
children to sate the appetites of a new generation of what
Larkin
would
have
characterised
as
‘gradgrinds,
scroogers, sweaters and hypocrites’.
Securing a fair outcome to the current Croke Park
negotiations ranks second only to the bank deal in Ireland’s
battle to emerge from the ‘bailout’.
The challenge is to
reconcile the requirement for an optimally efficient public
service, with the legitimate entitlements and interests of those
who are employed in the provision of it.
It would be
inappropriate to comment as the negotiations are currently
underway but we should be cognisant of what has already
been achieved. The Exchequer pay bill alone has been
reduced by 17.7% between 2009 and 2012. The economies
achieved are virtually unprecedented in any developed
country and that with a public service which already
employed a lower proportion of the labour force than in most
of the neighbouring countries in Europe.
Many on the left, in the trade union movement and outside it,
were severely critical of our support for the original
agreement. In their analysis, the movement should have opted
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for a policy of outright confrontation instead of taking the
negotiation route.
They regularly cite the memory of Jim Larkin and the heroic
men and women who suffered and starved in the streets of our
capital city throughout the cruel winter of 1913 into 1914 in
support of their assertion. They assume that Jim Larkin, were
he alive today, would lead the charge. They conveniently
forget that Larkin did not start the Great Dublin Lockout, and
that, in fact, he counselled members against voting for strike
action on August 25th 1913.
Larkin also called for binding
arbitration during the course of the dispute to end the
employers’ offensive. Of course, once war was declared, Jim
Larkin fought to win with every morsel of his being. Yes he
was a revolutionary socialist, a syndicalist who aspired to the
transformation of society along egalitarian lines.
But the
reality was that, no less than any leader, and he was a brilliant
leader, he would not choose to lead vulnerable men and
women and their families into a head-on collision with
overwhelmingly superior forces.
For some time now, there has been a clamour in various
organs of the establishment for a repudiation of the Croke
Park Agreement. Repeatedly, it has been asserted that the
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economic growth envisaged when it was negotiated in the
spring of 2010 has not materialised and consequently that
repudiation is in order.
Those of us who were strongly criticised for recommending it
did so precisely because the analysis we articulated from the
end of 2008 onwards strongly opposed the one-sided austerity
strategy.
This presented the illusion of short-term pain in
return for long term gain. It was precisely because we
believed the economy would not grow that we advocated the
Croke Park Agreement. We were not prepared to lead tens of
thousands of workers into an enormous confrontation in
which they would be depicted as a minority of one-sixth of
the workforce jeopardising the interests of the other fivesixths. Granted they would give a good account of themselves
in what would have been a cataclysmic battle but the outcome
was far from certain for either side. The only certainty is that
it would entail a great deal of self-inflicted damage for Ireland
and most particularly on those who depend on public services.
Of course, the Government has not created the objective
conditions conducive to agreement. Budget 2013 has been
deeply disappointing.
It has continued the process of
imposing the lion’s share of the burden of adjustment on those
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on low to middle incomes, while once again the wealthy have
got off lightly.
At the very least, the demand for a 3%
increase in the Universal Social Charge in respect of those on
incomes over €100,000 per annum should have been
conceded and tax relief on higher level pension contributions
should have been abolished from a date much earlier than the
first of January 2014. (Indeed this latter can still be done
through the impending Finance Bill).
It would generate
savings of about €125 million from mid-year which could be
used to alleviate the burden on those most severely affected
by the budget and it would lend some modicum of
respectability to the process.
If this were paralleled by the major Government infrastructure
stimulus package we have been advocating, as well as other
measures to grow the domestic economy and grow thousands
of jobs, it would have laid the basis for a real national
momentum.
As it is, the task facing the negotiators is extremely onerous
and it may well end up that there is no alternative but to
engage in the battle that those on both the extreme right and
the extreme left have been looking forward to for so long.
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Undoubtedly Larkin would have scolded the Labour Party,
which he co-founded and of which he died a member, because
of the budget. Yes, he would have scolded them, but he
would not have succumbed to the simplistic folly of blaming
Labour for the problem, which perfectly plays to the agenda
of those on the right of the political spectrum.
Indeed, it reflects a poverty of ambition on the left. Jim Larkin
would have faced up to the challenge of the inconvenient truth
that 60% of those who went out to vote in the last election
voted for those who guaranteed the better off that they would
not have to pay a wealth tax or a higher rate of tax on their
incomes. He would have framed the challenge in terms of the
need to convince sufficient numbers of those who voted for
these parties to shift their allegiance to some combination on
the left that represented their true interests.
In the pages of the Irish Worker he set about developing a
coherent, detailed economic and social programme that could
work in the narrow space in which he found himself - an
overwhelmingly rural, conservative Catholic polity whose
sights were set no higher than Home Rule.
If we are to be
honestly true to the legacy of Jim Larkin it behoves us to
abandon our sectarian comfort zones and to devise the best
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strategy we can to protect and advance the cause of working
people. Doing so requires living up to the challenges posed by
the difficult choices that confront us. Peddling illusions based
on romanticised and false images of the past serves only to
betray Larkin’s legacy. The fight for the fundamental demand
of Dublin’s heroic veterans of 1913 - that of the right to
collective bargaining, remains unfulfilled.
Today Ireland is one of only three EU member states where
workers do not have right to workplace representation, to sit
across the table from their employer to seek better pay and
conditions, and address their other concerns.
Developing a strategy to achieve this objective is the only
route to ensuring that the voice of organised workers is heard
in the Ireland of the twenty-first century. Only then can we
ensure that the vision of Jim Larkin and the other pioneers of
our movement to create a society consistent with the
principles of equality, fraternity and solidarity, to which they
dedicated their lives, can be achieved after their dreams were
so cruelly suppressed on the streets of this city a century ago
this year.
ENDS
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