Romanticised images of the past betrays Larkin’s legacy

Speech by Jack O’Conor, General President of SIPTU, at 66^th anniversary of the death of Jim Larkin, Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, January 30^th, 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.  He 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 which reflected the values of those who 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 the crisis in the first place are systematically exploiting the opportunity it presents to recalibrate 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 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 and outlook that would shape Ireland 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.

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, 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 previous Irish Governments into the greatest economic crisis in the history of the state and into accepting liability for the resultant debts of private speculators.  According 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 less than €1,000 per capita in any of the 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 ‘bail out’ as the financial markets have been factoring it in since the June 29^th 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 ‘bail out’. If we get one, (which cannot be taken for granted), it would 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 and their resultant 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, February 9^th in support of the Day of Action. This is not just another demonstration, it is crucial to the battle to convince Europe that we have 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 talks 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 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 25^th 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 repudiation of the Croke Park Agreement.

Repeatedly it has been asserted that the 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 five-sixths. 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 on low to middle incomes, while once again the wealthy have got off lightly.  At 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 €125m 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 parallel by the major Government infrastructure stimulus package we have 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 indeed and it may well end up that there is no alternative to engage in the battle that those on both the extreme right and the extreme left have been looking forward to so long.

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 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 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.