A-Infos (en) wsm.ie: Solidarity with the Dublin bus strike and the need for decent wages for all

The shutdown of Dublin bus services begins prematurely at 21.00 tonight thanks to 
management's refusal to trust the workers to wind down the service ahead of tomorrows two 
day strike, the first of three scheduled. As our name suggests Solidarity Times stands in 
solidarity with the bus workers, just as we were in solidarity with the LUAS strikes. ---- 
In both strikes a media looking for angles to attack the workers on choose the relative 
size of the pay claims they were making. 21% sounds big but the period covered, 2008 to 
2019, is actually 11 years. But workers in Dublin need big pay increases and contrary to 
what RTE might tell you this isn't a bad thing for most of us, quite the opposite. ---- 
Dublin has often been a city with extreme divisions between poverty and wealth. The 
tenements of the Strumpet City of the 1910s were one side of the city, the other was the 
thousands of families living in mansions with 3 or more servants. The 1913 lockout was 
centered on transport workers, in that case the trams.

Today in Dublin 1 in 40, or 5% of families have over one million euro in assets excluding 
the home they live in. But the rocketing cost of rent and mortgages means most workers 
can't afford a home in the city where they work. There are only two solutions to that, a 
drastic reduction in the cost of housing or a drastic increase in the share of wealth 
going to ordinary workers. That requires a drastic increase in wages. Our expectation 
should be that by our 20s we should be able to obtain a secure home with enough space for 
us to comfortably live in, a situation that is currently out of reach for 80% of people in 
this city.

Declining union membership has meant that most workers now have little control over what 
they are paid. Our pay is set by our boss and we can like or lump that. The minimum wage 
is a joke, no one believes that its possible to have a reasonable life on such a low wage. 
So for most of us it's a race to the bottom in which there are only two things holding 
back a complete wage collapse.

The first is that a very few workers have skills that are still rare, this is particularly 
true of some computer workers. Incidentally this is why the government is so keen to pump 
up the number of graduates in that sector, not because there is infinite work but because 
they want a surplus of workers in that sector so wages can be driven down.
The second brake is that some workers are still organised and although unions are the 
weakest they have been in decades this means they can still organise to resist pay cuts 
and more importantly demand pay rises. We don't want to overstate that, the strongest 
organised sector is the public sector and workers there took a hammering, suffering 
enormous pay cuts and what is now heading for a 8 year pay freeze. The reasons for that 
deserve an article in itself but partly it was down to the massive demoralisation 
following the media led attacks on those workers back in 2009 and the subsequent collapse 
in resistance after the one day strike.

So why have transport workers been at the tip of the spear when it comes to fighting for 
the sort of wage increases we all need? One reason perhaps is that the unsocial hours they 
work - which mean they have to be at depots before public transport is running - mean they 
have to live in the city. But the wages they earn are too low for them to be able to 
afford decent accommodation within a reasonable distance of many depots.

More importantly though they have power. When tra
http://www.wsm.ie/c/solidarity-dublin-bus-strike-decent-wages-all
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://lists.ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en