Work, wages and welfare

Joan Burton is to be commended for ‘protecting the welfare safety net’ during this crisis.
However this achievement has to be set against a government policy of choosing redundancy and retirement as solutions to expenditure cuts as distinct from wage sharing in the PS.
The fact that the State is subsidising low wages, through the FIS scheme is well made. One wonders if such subsidisation could not be recouped from the employers, in cases where those employers are profitable. Otherwise one could easily argue that the FIS is a straight transfer to the pockets of profitable business owners.

“Social partnership these days has a very bad name.

Yet Padraig Yeates also makes the point that social partnership is arguably “a more modern and more effective way of exerting industrial muscle and social solidarity on behalf of the weak and the marginalised than
the sympathetic strike ever was”.

It is my own belief that collective bargaining is the best way to address the matters I have touched upon above, so that State, employers and unions seek to cooperate in their collective best interests rather than clash in nobody’s interest. ”

It is unfortunate that the unemployed did not make its way into the last sentence. Perhaps that was an oversight, perhaps.

On the whole business of the 1913 commemoration, while it has many lessons for us, I have to say that the several well remunerated suits attempting to remake connections with Rashers Tierney and Mr Hennessy, was stretching reality to very limits.

are being su