Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

It is deeply shameful that we are seeing a combined assault of millionaires and even billionaires against some 250,000 workers who are among the lowest paid in this land, with the intention of further driving down their already low incomes and pushing them into further poverty. We have the spectacle of those who live in mansions and palaces with rolling acres demanding that workers who can barely survive should be put in an even more invidious and difficult position. That the political establishment in this State and in this Parliament rows in with them is also deeply shameful but, I suppose, predictable.

The reality is that the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, Deputy Richard Bruton, himself a millionaire rancher from the plains of Meath, lives light years removed from the conditions of life of working-class people who face an enormous struggle to survive in current circumstances. Make no mistake, wage cutting is the agenda of the Minister and the Government. Never mind the talk of flexibility, reform and all the rest. One need only consider what the Minister told Harry McGee, political correspondent of The Irish Times, a month or two ago:

Some 60,000 workers are currently on the national minimum wage and Mr Bruton said the savings achieved by employers by cutting the rate would be very small. By contrast, he said, some four times more people benefited from the JLC structure and reforming it would have a greater and more immediate impact on wage costs.

What is this but a straight argument for the slashing of the wages of workers under the JLC system?

We had monstrous distortions from the Minister, Deputy Bruton, last night. For example, he claimed that sectors and occupations in the economy where the greatest job losses have occurred are those sectors where minimum wage and sectoral agreements are prevalent. In other words, the Minister is trying to give the impression that the catastrophic loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs in recent years had something to with the rights of workers and the level of their wages. What a monstrous distortion when we have, in the United States and in Europe, a financial market system which imploded under the weight of the speculation and profiteering of the preceding period, where the speculators, vampire banks and various sharks in the markets were given a free hand through deregulation and privatisation to profiteer and racketeer at will, putting the very structures of society at risk as a result of their grab for private profit. As a result of that, the system inevitably imploded and brought the real economy crashing down with it. Hundreds of thousands of Irish workers and millions internationally are the victims of that diseased capital market.

Did the Minister, Deputy Bruton, raise a single question about the need radically to change the system that has caused this catastrophe? Not a word. Rather, we had an attack on the lowest-paid workers in the country. Did he say anything about how we should perhaps talk about production and financial systems which would benefit society and cater for the needs of the majority rather than the greed of the minority? Not a word. We have a Government of Fine Gael and the Labour Party which has capitulated lock, stock and barrel to the diktats of the International Monetary Fund, the bureaucracy of the European Union and the European Central Bank which is, in turn, representing the naked interests - and blatantly so - of major German, French, British and other banks and various and assorted speculators who gambled in Irish property and lost. They are faceless, unaccountable and unelected, but the Government puts their interests, their profit and their preservation ahead by miles of the fate of the lowest-paid workers in our country.

The Government diverts billions of taxpayers' funds to these speculators and banks which, if invested in the creation of jobs through major public infrastructural projects, for example, would create tens of thousands of jobs, revive and regenerate the economy and therefore allow our services to be developed, the pensions of elderly and retired workers to be defended and so forth. Instead we have a delusion that cutting the wages of the lowest paid will create more jobs when all the evidence is that the austerity carried out so far has been a catastrophe, as many Deputies on the left have already pointed out in this debate.

The Minister said last night that existing workers will not be affected by the changes, which will only apply to new employees. We object in the first instance to yellow-pack workers of any kind who are on lesser terms than those working beside them. However, let us consider what is stated in the Duffy Walsh report on this particular point:

For their part, employer bodies told us that they would not seek to unilaterally change contractual rates of pay or other conditions of existing staff in the event of the JLC system being abolished. They did, however, indicate that employers would seek to change the conditions of current employees by agreement.

The report goes on to state:

A proposal was put forward by [the business organisation] IBEC whereby transitional statutory protection could be provided ... While this proposal has merit, in separate submissions to the review, the representatives of employers in three of the major sectors affected by E[mployment] R[egulation] O[rder]s indicated that they would be unwilling to engage in collective bargaining with trade unions. They told us that they would deal directly with their staff, either individually or collectively, with a view to seeking agreement on reduced terms subject to statutory minima.

That statement alone would send a chill down the spines of the workers concerned who know very well, being in vulnerable positions, they would be put under relentless pressure to agree to cut their wages. All one needs to do is to look across the road at the example of the workers in the Davenport Hotel, who found themselves in that position.

Members have heard the lamentable and embarrassing input of Labour Party Deputies to this discussion and their perfunctory attendance and attention to this debate is quite shameful. There has been a despicable distortion of the United Left Alliance's decision to vote against the Social Welfare and Pensions Bill, allegedly because we did not wish the cut in the minimum wage to be restored to workers when of course we were defending the right of workers to have a pension under the current arrangements. We stand on our record of the defence of the most vulnerable and low-paid workers. Members should enter into their computer search engines the words "Gama" and "2005" and they will see how the left in Ireland overturned a monstrous regime of industrial-sized exploitation of migrant workers, that is, those who are among the most vulnerable. We do not need to answer the spurious and despicable distortions of the Labour Party Members, who must of course cover up the fact that they will come into this Chamber tonight to vote for the weasel words of the Government amendment in opposition to the clear stand taken in this motion by the United Left Alliance.

The United Left Alliance seeks to protect the wages and rights of those workers who are among the lowest paid in Ireland. The Government amendment means words, under cover of which wages cuts would be carried out and rights eroded. A Leas-Cheann Comhairle, I put the Government on warning that it will be resisted. In particular, I put Labour Party Deputies on warning because they received an endorsement from some trade unions and some of them claim to have some links with the tradition of the great Jim Connolly and Jim Larkin. If they had a commitment to the solidarity and the traditions of Connolly and Larkin, they would vote with the United Left Alliance in this Chamber tonight.

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