Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

Ireland is a low-wage, high-profit economy in which 30% of all workers are low paid and in which corporate profits have doubled in the past five years to €10 billion. These two facts are not unrelated; they are completely intertwined.

The Government at this time of low wages and high profits wants to ensure that profits remain high at the cost of workers' wages remaining low. This is at a time when a no-deal Brexit threatens the living standards of ordinary working-class people. The Government's answer is to prepare to shovel money towards corporations, often with no strings attached, at the same time as putting off a minimum wage increase. The Government is also determined to ensure that corporations pay little or no tax on those super profits. Why? It is because the Government represents the interests of those corporations and of the 1%, not the interests of working people.

The only answer to the organised Government-sanctioned greed of the corporations is the organisation of workers into fighting democratic trade unions to fight for increased wages and decent conditions. A part of that is a struggle for a €15 per hour minimum wage, that is, a living wage as a bottom or legally-sanctioned floor for all workers. All workers would gain from that increase.

The trade union movement and workers in this country should take inspiration from the struggle for $15 per hour in the US, which has spread to many different states and has passed the Houses of Congress, admittedly with a 2025 deadline. Socialists played a key role in organising and fighting for that measure. The slogan of the 15 Now campaign was "because the rent cannot wait". The workers throughout this city and country who are facing rents of €2,000 plus, and soaring, could not get a more appropriate slogan as to why we need a struggle for a living minimum wage of €15 per hour in this country now. It is because the rent simply cannot wait.

See this speech in context