Social Partnership - open meeting to discuss campaign

national | worker & community struggles and protests | event notice Wednesday February 22, 2006 21:03 by DD

Trade unionists are invited to an open meeting to discuss the establishment of a broad and effective campaign against the coming partnership deal and related matters on Monday 27th February at 8 p.m. in the Teachers Club, Parnell Square, Dublin.

ANOTHER DECADE OF SOCIAL PARTNERSHIP.

Are we going to take it without a fight?

20th February 2006

To all trade unionists.

Colleagues,

The ICTU has agreed that any new social partnership agreement should run for up to ten years. This would lock the trade unions into the restrictions, delaying procedures, peace clauses, ‘verifications’ and binding arbitration of partnership agreements for ten long years. It would extend the decline of the movement under partnership (now heading for a density of one in five in the private sector). It would keep our unions in partnership with the rich and powerful until 2016. This at a time when we are undergoing, in the words of SIPTU’s Jack O’Connor, the most serious attack on trade union rights and conditions since the Second World War. It is a time for the fighting spirit of the 9th December Irish Ferries march, not the acquiescence of social partnership.

Many trade unionists inclined to support another partnership deal will be concerned about running three national deals (or ten old ones) into one (even if the pay elements are to be of shorter duration). SIPTU stood back from a new deal for four months because there was no point in a partnership that allowed the dumping of union members and their replacement by super-exploited agency workers. When SIPTU finally entered talks it was with the assurance to members that exploring measures against displacement and exploitation would be the first strand of the negotiations. A longer deal was never mentioned at the three SIPTU Conferences since October. Yet the ICTU, which entered talks without a final Conference, immediately floated a six-year deal and have now apparently agreed to a ten-year one. But even after this time the talks have not got past that first hurdle of guarantees to protect employment standards.

Are we going to take this new departure on social partnership lying down? What will our movement be like after that ten years? What will the country be like? Ireland is already one of the most unequal countries in the industrialised world. We need a campaign in the unions for the rejection of such a deal. In recent years the ‘No’ campaigns have been very small. This time we owe it to the movement to organise for the biggest possible ‘No’ vote. There is an alternative to independent trade unionism dying out.

Trade union activists are invited to attend an open meeting to discuss the establishment of a broad and effective campaign against the coming partnership deal and related matters on Monday 27th February at 8 p.m. in the Teachers Club, Parnell Square, Dublin. Please come along and give us your views and ideas.

Sincerely,

Des Derwin
Eddie Conlon