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CrisisJam #11
Contents
The current crisis will be (and is being) used to make people work harder, faster, longer. In this special edition on work, Eadaoin O'Sullivan makes an appeal for worker solidarity; Harry Browne reminds us that 'the historic ambition of the labour movement was not simply for better-paid work, or even safer or less alienating work: it was for less work; Conor McCabe writes that 'Class is not about choices or purchases or consumption or decking. It is about power'; Nyder O'Leary wonders if those who exhort that Ireland must get working know exactly what it is we're supposed to work at; and Helen Lowry debunks the myth that wages are crippling the food service industry.
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There is life beyond the Pale: on the Healy-Raes and the rural-urban divide
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Rural Ireland doesn't exist. Except for all of the people who live there, that is. But they don't count - or, more specifically, they don't feature in the national media as anything other than twee peasants with funny voices or gombeen politicians. 'Parish-pump politics' has become an insult but, writes Nyder O'Leary, when you live with the sure and certain knowledge that nobody except your local politician could give two hoots about your locality or your community, the incentive ... |
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BlackRock, stress tests, and more of the same: it's time for an alternative
 Ireland's crisis is also an international one - a fact that is routinely ignored in the standard media narrative. If only the Galway Tent had blown into the sea in 2001; if only the line between business and politics had been drawn in barbed wire; if only Lenihan hadn't guaranteed the banks; if only...While it is true that the scale of the crisis in Ireland is unique, the austerity mania currently sweeping this country is certainly not, and points to the wider, international crisis that has...
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'Let's get Ireland working!' At what?
 Hilariously, if you type the phrase 'pointless work' into Flickr (and set it to return only creative commons licensed images) the first page of results consists almost solely of pictures of Enda Kenny sitting in front of his party's 'Let's Get Ireland Working' slogan. At no point have Fine Gael ever really clarified what they're going to get Ireland working at, and that, writes Nyder O'Leary, is because they have no idea what it is an economy is supposed to do. The aim of a 'functioning eco...
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Class: it's not about choice, it's about power
 When moneygeddon struck in 2008 it spilled macchiato all over the idea that anyone but the elite of the elite has any power, either in this country or abroad. Sorry Mr McWilliams, but as Conor McCabe writes below: 'Class is not about choices or purchases or consumption or decking. It is about power.' And if we've learnt anything in the past few years, it's that the vast majority of us have very little.
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Invasion of the time bandits
 Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer's time and their 'own' time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.
-E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism
The ideal office worker is a person whose personal life is entirely flexible and does not in any way limit the time they... |
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Employment Regulation Orders and protecting the vulnerable
 Back in March, the Quick Service Food Alliance took a case challenging the constitutionality of the Joint Labour Committee system that sets wages and conditions in their industry. Food service is one of the least unionised and lowest paid industries in the country, and yet employers complain that wage costs are crippling their businesses. As Helen Lowry writes, wages have at best a minimal effect on the cost of food to the consumer, so the desire to abolish the few standards on pay and condition
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Are Gypsies Having Sex with Britain’s Swans? Or, the Meaning of Myers
 Sigh. A long, sustainted Pat Rabbitte special. Kevin Myers is attracting a lot of attention today. To respond, or not respond? It depends. It’s not worth engaging with what he meant - as he doesn’t propose actual arguments - but it may be worth considering what he means, as a symptom of something else. By Gavan Titley.
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Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what you will!
 In all the hollering and shouting and brouhaha over public service pay and conditions one point was (strangely) seldom if ever made. And that point is: why, instead of insisting the public sector should step up, get busy, and be more like the private, don't we insist that the private become more like the public? Here's a why: because, blinded with the religious fervour that is neoliberalism and its glancing relationship with fact, our only imperative is to grow the economy and get Ireland workin
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Magazine Archive
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William Wall suggests a new proclamation for a new country: Anglo-Ireland™.