Today in Ireland took place a massive national demonstration in the national sporting arena with up to 3000 people cramming in to hear speech’s and bands all encouraging ordinary Irish folk to refuse to pay the household charge. What a reaction this got I have been following developments all day and speech’s from our own TD Joe Higgins in Ireland getting a fantastic reception too. This can be the spark that lights this campaign and allows it to really take off I feel.
What is the background to this then you may ask?
The Irish government, as part of its crippling deal with the troika will soon introduce a new “household charge”, another financial burden on working families after an onslaught of austerity attacks linked to the IMF/EU plan. The Socialist Party (CWI in Ireland) pledges to organise a mass campaign of non-payment, along the lines of the mass movement which defeated water charges in the 1990s and the victorious poll tax struggle in Britain.
The government’s proposed Household Charge of €100 is the forerunner for water charges and a property tax on every home. A pensioner or low paid worker pays the same as a millionaire. How rotten! This new tax has absolutely nothing to do with improving council services – the proceeds go towards the bailout of wealthy gamblers and bankers, for which ordinary people are being bled dry.
Everyone knows the tax will start at €100 and rise relentlessly, if we let it. The Economic Social and Research Institute called for household taxes for years. Its leading economist, John Fitzgerald, has said this is only “the beginning” and that a home tax of €800 plus a water tax of €500 is needed.
Already, life is becoming intolerable with the Universal Social Charge, pay cuts, rising mortgage payments and even management fees on many home-owners.
In a remarkable U-turn on pre-election promises, Fine Gael and Labour are now fully committed to the EU/IMF/ECB package of bailing out bankers but austerity and cuts for us. By taking all of the money away from ordinary people, personal consumption has collapsed by €13 billion in 3 years, adding to unemployment. Austerity is what is causing the economic havoc throughout Europe. It will make the crisis much worse and guarantee bankruptcy.
This tax is not deducted at source and we can and must defeat it. This can only be done by building a grassroots campaign of non-payment in every area. The Socialist Party in Dublin West plan has been to work with the community to do just this. In the 1990s, the Socialist Party led the Anti Water Charges Federation which successfully defeated water charges then.
Protest in Northern Ireland
Building non-payment, challenging in the courts and political opposition forced the then FG/Labour government to abolish water charges. In particular, the by-election challenge of Joe Higgins in 1996 in Dublin West became a referendum on water tax and rocked the political establishment.
Minister Bruton has dismissed this charge as “only €100”. While this amount is of course a burden for many families, the figure will skyrocket beyond €1,000 quickly as the ‘troika’ has ordered other home taxes within two years. The government is testing the ground for heftier Property and Water Taxes. If they get this one bedded down, they will be more confident to proceed. If we build non-payment of the Household Charge from the start, it makes it very difficult to impose two new taxes.
The government will go all-out to try force people to pay. A monthly draconian fine and court has been threatened. Contrast this to the light-touch handling of the white-collar criminal millionaires who destroyed the economy! Not one banker or businessman has been brought to book. By building a powerful campaign of civil disobedience with roots in every area, solidarity can give confidence to householders to be united and maintain non-payment. Tens of thousands of people can’t be dragged through the courts.
Labour now stands with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail in supporting household and water charges – despite expensive media ads opposing them before the elections. Labour should be reminded of this cynical betrayal. Labour politicians who say they oppose the tax, but remain in a party pushing it through, can only be seen as opportunist. While Sinn Fein has said it opposes the household tax, it has unfortunately ruled out putting its resources behind supporting non-payment, which is the only way this rip-off can be defeated. This will no doubt disappoint many Sinn Fein voters.
The Socialist Party / United Left Alliance is the only party clearly putting forward a boycott and actively committed to building and being part of an independent, broad-based national campaign to defeat Household and Water Taxes. Our track record is second to none on this issue.
Despite the daily media propaganda, there is considerable untapped wealth in Ireland. The country is not broke. Ireland remains 6th out of 27 EU countries in financial wealth, but of course, this wealth is concentrated in a few hands. The Central Bank reported in May that there is €120 billion in Irish bank deposits – why could a wealth tax not be imposed on this rather than taking from households, from our education and health services? Massive natural gas and oil resources could also be explored for the benefit of Irish society, rather than for one or two multinationals.
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Showing posts with label Joe higgins. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe higgins. Show all posts
Saturday, 24 March 2012
Saturday, 21 January 2012
The dimise of the high street, time for retail sector unions to organise
As the current economic crisis deepens the high street retailers are starting to be hit one by one, in the last few weeks we have heard of several companies struggling financially after a poor Christmas with their sales.
This is no surprise with thousands of public sector workers not to mentin thousands more in the private sector being thrown out of work people have little spare money to spend on the high street any longer and this will have a knock on effect.
Administrators KPMG announced they were 'delighted' to have saved 1,000 jobs with La Senza in the UK on Monday.
They didn't mention the remaining 1,600 workers thrown on the dole with ten minutes' notice.
Stunned workers were given 30 minutes to collect their belongings and a standard form to claim redundancy money and unpaid wages from the Insolvency Service.
At a mass meeting in the warehouse on Monday night, a representative from KPMG unceremoniously informed 250 warehouse, mail order and office staff that despite the 'rescue' deal signed with Alshaya, our jobs, as well as those of the staff of 80 stores, were no longer required.
Alshaya is one of the largest retail companies in the Middle East and manages over 55 international brands.
In my workplace, this blow falls particularly heavily on young workers, most under the age of 30, and many with young families.
The sense of shock and betrayal in the air was palpable, as former La Senza employees queued to collect their forms.
Many workers have ten, 15 or 20 years service with the company, who are currently claiming that we are only entitled to statutory redundancy pay from the government, which could take over three months to be paid.
The disgust was particularly strong because of the lies and distortions fed to the workforce over the last few weeks.
Following the announcement that La Senza was in trouble just before Christmas, we were repeatedly told that we shouldn't worry, that a deal was being negotiated and we should carry on working as normal.
Mail order and warehouse staff were even made to do extra overtime (on top of what we normally do, meaning 12 hour shifts or more), in order to catch up with orders. We now have to claim these wages from the government as well.
La Senza, KPMG and the other retail giants and consortiums claim that restructuring and job losses are necessary due to the state of the economy, ie the collapse in consumer spending brought on by the credit crisis, and exacerbated by government attacks on public sector workers and wage freezes, cuts to hours and job losses in the private sector.
These factors undoubtedly exist. However, in the case of La Senza, it is not so much that the company is losing money, it is just not making enough money to satisfy the private equity parasites, Lion Capital, who withdrew their investment.
Alshaya have swooped in like vultures, to pick off the 60 best stores, and add them to their already massive high street portfolio.
La Senza workers in the UK are heartened by and 100% in support of the occupation of the Liffey Valley store in Dublin, demanding their overtime payments for December and unpaid wages.
The speech made by Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins in the Dáil supporting these workers, was particularly inspiring, and should stand as a lesson to politicians in the UK who claim to represent ordinary people. (You can watch the video here: http://www.joehiggins.ie/2012/01/video-joe-higgins-urges-minister-to-ensure-la-senza-workers-entitlements-are-met/ or see below for transcription)
2012 will see further downturns in the retail sector, with further mass redundancies likely. It is time for the general unions: Unite, GMB and Usdaw, to step up their recruitment campaigns in this sector massively.
It is also time for all workers and trade unionists to join the fight for new workers' party, that will stand up for the rights of ordinary workers, and fight back against the savage attacks by the bosses, big business and the Con-Dem government.
Joe Higgins' speech in the Dáil
I welcome the representatives of the La Senza workers to the Visitors' Gallery and I am in solidarity with the Vita Cortex workers suffering from similar high-handed disgusting treatment.
It is breathtaking in its arrogance and disrespect towards the up to 120 mainly female workers in the La Senza lingerie stores in Dublin and Cork that the company waited until the workers had left work on Monday evening to inform them by random phone calls - through the agency of KPMG doing the dirty work for the company - that they need not come in on Tuesday morning.
It is beneath contempt that ordinary workers were told the company did not have the phone numbers of their colleagues and were asked to phone and tell them, including a manageress who worked loyally for the company for eight or nine years. It is absolutely incredible.
The workers are victims of the private equity vulture company, Lion Capital, which in the most callous way planned to walk away from its workforce to maximise its profit, handing it over to another company which will be equally ruthless, and treating these workers in the most disgusting fashion. This is capitalism red in tooth and claw and must be challenged.
Fine Gael and Labour Party Deputies come here and champion workers. They are the people who make and stand over the laws.
For a change, let us have emergency laws to allow workers to receive their rights and to stop these gangsters behaving in this gangster-like fashion.
I call on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and its leaders to come out of hiding and meet fire with fire.
They should mobilise the power of working people in the country to stand together with the Vita Cortex and La Senza workers.
Workers standing together will show the power they have, forcing the Government to act and these companies to pay what they should.
This is no surprise with thousands of public sector workers not to mentin thousands more in the private sector being thrown out of work people have little spare money to spend on the high street any longer and this will have a knock on effect.
Administrators KPMG announced they were 'delighted' to have saved 1,000 jobs with La Senza in the UK on Monday.
They didn't mention the remaining 1,600 workers thrown on the dole with ten minutes' notice.
Stunned workers were given 30 minutes to collect their belongings and a standard form to claim redundancy money and unpaid wages from the Insolvency Service.
At a mass meeting in the warehouse on Monday night, a representative from KPMG unceremoniously informed 250 warehouse, mail order and office staff that despite the 'rescue' deal signed with Alshaya, our jobs, as well as those of the staff of 80 stores, were no longer required.
Alshaya is one of the largest retail companies in the Middle East and manages over 55 international brands.
In my workplace, this blow falls particularly heavily on young workers, most under the age of 30, and many with young families.
The sense of shock and betrayal in the air was palpable, as former La Senza employees queued to collect their forms.
Many workers have ten, 15 or 20 years service with the company, who are currently claiming that we are only entitled to statutory redundancy pay from the government, which could take over three months to be paid.
The disgust was particularly strong because of the lies and distortions fed to the workforce over the last few weeks.
Following the announcement that La Senza was in trouble just before Christmas, we were repeatedly told that we shouldn't worry, that a deal was being negotiated and we should carry on working as normal.
Mail order and warehouse staff were even made to do extra overtime (on top of what we normally do, meaning 12 hour shifts or more), in order to catch up with orders. We now have to claim these wages from the government as well.
La Senza, KPMG and the other retail giants and consortiums claim that restructuring and job losses are necessary due to the state of the economy, ie the collapse in consumer spending brought on by the credit crisis, and exacerbated by government attacks on public sector workers and wage freezes, cuts to hours and job losses in the private sector.
These factors undoubtedly exist. However, in the case of La Senza, it is not so much that the company is losing money, it is just not making enough money to satisfy the private equity parasites, Lion Capital, who withdrew their investment.
Alshaya have swooped in like vultures, to pick off the 60 best stores, and add them to their already massive high street portfolio.
La Senza workers in the UK are heartened by and 100% in support of the occupation of the Liffey Valley store in Dublin, demanding their overtime payments for December and unpaid wages.
The speech made by Socialist Party TD Joe Higgins in the Dáil supporting these workers, was particularly inspiring, and should stand as a lesson to politicians in the UK who claim to represent ordinary people. (You can watch the video here: http://www.joehiggins.ie/2012/01/video-joe-higgins-urges-minister-to-ensure-la-senza-workers-entitlements-are-met/ or see below for transcription)
2012 will see further downturns in the retail sector, with further mass redundancies likely. It is time for the general unions: Unite, GMB and Usdaw, to step up their recruitment campaigns in this sector massively.
It is also time for all workers and trade unionists to join the fight for new workers' party, that will stand up for the rights of ordinary workers, and fight back against the savage attacks by the bosses, big business and the Con-Dem government.
Joe Higgins' speech in the Dáil
I welcome the representatives of the La Senza workers to the Visitors' Gallery and I am in solidarity with the Vita Cortex workers suffering from similar high-handed disgusting treatment.
It is breathtaking in its arrogance and disrespect towards the up to 120 mainly female workers in the La Senza lingerie stores in Dublin and Cork that the company waited until the workers had left work on Monday evening to inform them by random phone calls - through the agency of KPMG doing the dirty work for the company - that they need not come in on Tuesday morning.
It is beneath contempt that ordinary workers were told the company did not have the phone numbers of their colleagues and were asked to phone and tell them, including a manageress who worked loyally for the company for eight or nine years. It is absolutely incredible.
The workers are victims of the private equity vulture company, Lion Capital, which in the most callous way planned to walk away from its workforce to maximise its profit, handing it over to another company which will be equally ruthless, and treating these workers in the most disgusting fashion. This is capitalism red in tooth and claw and must be challenged.
Fine Gael and Labour Party Deputies come here and champion workers. They are the people who make and stand over the laws.
For a change, let us have emergency laws to allow workers to receive their rights and to stop these gangsters behaving in this gangster-like fashion.
I call on the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and its leaders to come out of hiding and meet fire with fire.
They should mobilise the power of working people in the country to stand together with the Vita Cortex and La Senza workers.
Workers standing together will show the power they have, forcing the Government to act and these companies to pay what they should.
Thursday, 19 January 2012
Marxists attitudes towards parliament and elections
We are faced with the fact that Parliament exists and that the mass of the population, despite their criticisms, look to it for change. In 1940 Trotsky, while discussing the question of war, explained how Marxists must make use of bourgeois institutions like parliament. “The courts are bourgeois but we don’t boycott them as the anarchists. We try to use them and fight within them. Likewise with parliaments. We are enemies of the bourgeoisie and its institutions, but we utilise them.”
Trotsky carried the argument forward – to the question of war: “War is a bourgeois institution a thousand times more powerful than all the other bourgeois institutions. We accept it as a fact like the bourgeois schools and try to utilise it.” He continues:
“In the union I can say I am for the Fourth International. I am against war. But I am with you. I will not sabotage the war. I will be the best soldier just as I was the best and most skilled worker in the factory. At the same time I will try to convince you too that we should change society.” (Writings, 1939-40, p. 256).
So with parliament. There is no contradiction between understanding, from a revolutionary point of view, the true nature of a bourgeois parliament and at the same time fighting for every crumb, every concession we can gain from it. In the same sense as Trotsky in 1940 advocated that the members of the Fourth International, while opposing the war; in the case of that particular war should be the “best soldiers,” we must be the “best parliamentary representatives,” the most effective in squeezing every possible concession and, at the same time, the most resolute in revealing its limitations. If we are to expose the limits of change through parliament we have to struggle within it to reach those limits and thereby bring them into the view of the working class.
Instead of such sterile ultra-leftism we explain that we are fighting to become the majority in parliament and go on to spell out what we would do if we had that majority. We say we would pass legislation to take the wealth out of the hands of the ruling class. But, as the bitter experience of Chile showed, the ruling class will not peaceably surrender their wealth and power. They would use their control of the armed machinery of the state to resist. Under those circumstances we would mobilise the working class to confront them, just as the Bolsheviks did in August 1917. Part of this resistance would be the formation of workers’ councils, of committees in the army, in short of the emergence of an alternative state based on the independent power of the working class. In this way the real question of power would be posed.
The sociaist party and its sisters organisations in the CWI have had people elected to parliaments in the past and still do currenty have 2 TD's in Ireland and a MEP in the European parliament. We dont see this as a end goal but a way of fighting for concessions for the working class in the most critical way of the system possible.
The election of Joe Higgins is not the first occasion that we have participated in parliament. In Britain, Dave Nellist, Pat Wall and Terry Fields, all members of Militant, sat as Labour MPs and were able to use parliament as a tribune for socialist ideas. Terry Fields went to prison for refusing to pay his poll tax. None of these representatives succumbed to the parliamentary pressures. Sadly, Pat Wall died while an MP and the Labour leadership saw that he was replaced by a right-winger. Terry Fields and Dave Nellist were expelled from the Labour Party and eventually lost their seats because they refused to abandon their ideas and their principles.
Like Terry Fields, Pat Wall and Dave Nellist, Joe Higgins has not adopted the lifestyle or adapted to the customs and norms of bourgeois politics. He lives on a workers wage and provides the Dublin West electorate with an account of where the rest of his salary and all his allowances go. He has used the Dáil chamber to challenge the establishment. He has brought the scent of the class struggle into the otherwise rarefied atmosphere of the Dáil, as with his handcuffed gesture in solidarity with jailed building workers. He has used his position to promote working class struggle outside the Dáil, speaking at countless meetings, protests and pickets. He has intervened in debates on legislation, with opposition proposals and amendments. On top of this he has carried a huge constituency case load, trying to use his influence to help working class people in Dublin West with day-to-day problems.
The CWI has 20 sections and a number of other supporting groups. We work in a total of 35 countries and on every continent. Our World Congress brings together delegates from all sections and is the supreme decision making body of our International. Points of difference are debated in a democratic manner and decisions arrived at through debate.
A debate on any major issue is not the property of a small circle at the top of the organisation, but is something in which the membership needs to be involved. Whenever differences have arisen within our International, or when it has been necessary to adjust our position or to correct past mistakes, we have involved the full membership in the discussions. International Discussion Bulletins, containing all the material from all sides of a debate, have been produced and made available to every member. Only in this way can we educate and involve the membership and only then can the members, in turn, become fully informed, intervene and act as a check on all decisions made.
But when it comes to participating in such roles we will always keep a firm grip on democracy and keep it with us at all times.
In order to withstand the pressures of moods, temporary or longer lasting, which develop within the working class, it is essential that a revolutionary party maintains a democratic centralist structure. This means the fullest internal discussion on all issues including points of difference, but unity in action when it comes to putting agreed decisions into effect.
Trotsky carried the argument forward – to the question of war: “War is a bourgeois institution a thousand times more powerful than all the other bourgeois institutions. We accept it as a fact like the bourgeois schools and try to utilise it.” He continues:
“In the union I can say I am for the Fourth International. I am against war. But I am with you. I will not sabotage the war. I will be the best soldier just as I was the best and most skilled worker in the factory. At the same time I will try to convince you too that we should change society.” (Writings, 1939-40, p. 256).
So with parliament. There is no contradiction between understanding, from a revolutionary point of view, the true nature of a bourgeois parliament and at the same time fighting for every crumb, every concession we can gain from it. In the same sense as Trotsky in 1940 advocated that the members of the Fourth International, while opposing the war; in the case of that particular war should be the “best soldiers,” we must be the “best parliamentary representatives,” the most effective in squeezing every possible concession and, at the same time, the most resolute in revealing its limitations. If we are to expose the limits of change through parliament we have to struggle within it to reach those limits and thereby bring them into the view of the working class.
Instead of such sterile ultra-leftism we explain that we are fighting to become the majority in parliament and go on to spell out what we would do if we had that majority. We say we would pass legislation to take the wealth out of the hands of the ruling class. But, as the bitter experience of Chile showed, the ruling class will not peaceably surrender their wealth and power. They would use their control of the armed machinery of the state to resist. Under those circumstances we would mobilise the working class to confront them, just as the Bolsheviks did in August 1917. Part of this resistance would be the formation of workers’ councils, of committees in the army, in short of the emergence of an alternative state based on the independent power of the working class. In this way the real question of power would be posed.
The sociaist party and its sisters organisations in the CWI have had people elected to parliaments in the past and still do currenty have 2 TD's in Ireland and a MEP in the European parliament. We dont see this as a end goal but a way of fighting for concessions for the working class in the most critical way of the system possible.
The election of Joe Higgins is not the first occasion that we have participated in parliament. In Britain, Dave Nellist, Pat Wall and Terry Fields, all members of Militant, sat as Labour MPs and were able to use parliament as a tribune for socialist ideas. Terry Fields went to prison for refusing to pay his poll tax. None of these representatives succumbed to the parliamentary pressures. Sadly, Pat Wall died while an MP and the Labour leadership saw that he was replaced by a right-winger. Terry Fields and Dave Nellist were expelled from the Labour Party and eventually lost their seats because they refused to abandon their ideas and their principles.
Like Terry Fields, Pat Wall and Dave Nellist, Joe Higgins has not adopted the lifestyle or adapted to the customs and norms of bourgeois politics. He lives on a workers wage and provides the Dublin West electorate with an account of where the rest of his salary and all his allowances go. He has used the Dáil chamber to challenge the establishment. He has brought the scent of the class struggle into the otherwise rarefied atmosphere of the Dáil, as with his handcuffed gesture in solidarity with jailed building workers. He has used his position to promote working class struggle outside the Dáil, speaking at countless meetings, protests and pickets. He has intervened in debates on legislation, with opposition proposals and amendments. On top of this he has carried a huge constituency case load, trying to use his influence to help working class people in Dublin West with day-to-day problems.
The CWI has 20 sections and a number of other supporting groups. We work in a total of 35 countries and on every continent. Our World Congress brings together delegates from all sections and is the supreme decision making body of our International. Points of difference are debated in a democratic manner and decisions arrived at through debate.
A debate on any major issue is not the property of a small circle at the top of the organisation, but is something in which the membership needs to be involved. Whenever differences have arisen within our International, or when it has been necessary to adjust our position or to correct past mistakes, we have involved the full membership in the discussions. International Discussion Bulletins, containing all the material from all sides of a debate, have been produced and made available to every member. Only in this way can we educate and involve the membership and only then can the members, in turn, become fully informed, intervene and act as a check on all decisions made.
But when it comes to participating in such roles we will always keep a firm grip on democracy and keep it with us at all times.
In order to withstand the pressures of moods, temporary or longer lasting, which develop within the working class, it is essential that a revolutionary party maintains a democratic centralist structure. This means the fullest internal discussion on all issues including points of difference, but unity in action when it comes to putting agreed decisions into effect.
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