Left Tribune - Oct 2014 by The Labour Party

The Left Tribune 7th November 2014

Inside ❖ ❖ ❖ ❖

“The Need for Solidarity in the Labour Party”, Grace Williams “Irish Travellers are an ethnic minority” Jeni Gartland “WW1 & Tom Johnson” Shane Folan “Misinterpreting Globalisation” Neil Warner

Your National Youth Executive 2013-2014 National Chair Ciarán Garrett Ciarán has overall responsibility for the development and management of Labour Youth.

Vice-Chair/Membership Development Officer

Siobhán de Paor Siobhán is in charge of recruitment and retention of members and assists Ciarán as Vice-Chairperson.

National Secretary Jason Deegan

Campaigns Officer Jeni Gartland

Jay is responsible for correspondence, minutes, fundraising and the keeping of Labour Youth accounts.

Jeni is responsible for planning, organising and executing Labour Youth’s national and regional campaigns.

Education & Policy Officer Jack Eustace

Communications Officer

Jack is responsible for Labour Youth policy development and education seminars.

Luke is responsible for all Labour Youth publications including the website, leaflets and posters.

International Officer

Neil Warner

Women’s Officer Angelina Cox

Neil manages international trips and is Labour Youth’s primary representative to our affiliates abroad.

Angelina is responsible for recruiting women, as well as developing our policy on issues relating primarily to women.

Luke Crowley-Holland

Youth & Development Officer Marty O’Prey Marty is an ex-officio, non-voting member of the NYE based in Labour Party Head Office. He assists the national development of Labour Youth.

Welcome to the Left Tribune TABLE OF CONTENTS Strikes and Sit-ins and Lockouts, Oh My! by Ciara Galvin PAGE 2 Nine Things You Mightn’t Know About Unions by Ciara Galvin PAGE 5 Onwards and Upwards by Andrew O Driscoll PAGE 7 The Need for Solidarity in Labour by Grace Williams PAGE 9 Why Don’t Economists Stick to the Economy? by Killian O’Sullivan PAGE 10 Remembering the First World War by Shane Folan PAGE 12 The Case for a Living Wage by Ciarán Garrett PAGE 13 Irish Travellers are an Ethnic Minority by Jeni Gartland PAGE 15 Misinterpreting Globalisation by Neil Warner PAGE 17 A M essage from the Com m unications Coordinator Hi everyone, I think I speak for everyone when I say that the articles that have been submitted this year have been absolutely fantastic. It is abundantly clear the work that everyone put into their articles, and this is greatly appreciated. As always, there is a wide variety of topics discussed in these fantastic articles. I would like to thank everyone who took time out to write these articles, and in particular Luke Crowley-Holland, Marty O’Prey and Ciarán Garrett who put in enormous amounts of work into getting the Tribune published. It has been an absolute pleasure to edit and work with everyone and I hope that everyone is happy with this edition! Kind Regards, Rachel Walsh Communications Coordinator 2013-2014

Strikes and Sit-ins and Lockouts, Oh My! IT’S AN EXCITING TIME to be part of the trade union movement in Ireland. In the last year or so, we’ve seen a notable increase in trade union activism: strikes, sit-ins and, most recently, a lock-out. Labour Youth too has become more active in the labour movement, largely thanks to the efforts of Ciarán, Jeni, and others. The following article is a round-up of just some of the ways we’ve gotten more involved this year. Zero Hour Contracts Perhaps most notably, we’ve campaigned with comrades in Ciara Galvin the trade union movement to end zero hour contracts, Trade Union Coordinator holding one particularly memorable protest outside a certain fast-food restaurant on O’Connell Street. The “End Zero Hour contracts campaign” page has, at the time of writing, 625 likes on Facebook. We also took to the colleges with a postcard campaign, collecting hundreds of signatures. But perhaps most significantly, our newly appointed Minister of State Ged Nash will be commissioning a study into the prevalence of zero hour contracts in Ireland. This may not sound like much, but a lack of data is the main reason they haven’t been stopped to date. I have no doubt that we will keep campaigning on this issue until zero hour contracts are abolished. Paris Bakery workers action Labour Youth also supported the Paris Bakery workers in their sit-in to be paid their wages. Four of our members travelled (with the Migrant Rights Centre and others) to protest outside the owners’ mansion when the owners Ruth Savil and Yannick Forel flatly refused to engage with, well, anyone. After nineteen days occupying their former workplace, the Paris Bakery workers won their wages and, additionally, new legislation is on the table to prevent future abuse of the loophole which allows/ed employers to withhold payment . Ramping up the activism We marched with our comrades on May Day this year - with a better turnout than last year and brought the banner out again at the Rally for Greyhound Workers. Our activists have been out in support of the Greyhound workers on numerous occasions since, helping hand out leaflets to commuters in Dublin, and spreading the word virtually through Twitter and Facebook. A recent thunderclap reached 129,923 people - hopefully a lot of those being Greyhound customers.

Strikes and Sit-ins and Lockouts, Oh My!

The GREYHOUND WORKERS were locked out of their workplace unless they accepted what amounted to a 35% pay cut. As they didn’t, they were replaced with strikebreakers from agencies. Shockingly, this cut would still put them at 10% above the refuse collection industry average, which goes to show that increased competition really is used to drive down wages. Justice for Greyhound Workers posters were popping up in windows all over the place, solidarity funds for €400, €5,000, everything up to €10,000 were being sent to the workers by unions such as Unite, the Civil Public and Services Union, the Communications Workers Union, Mandate, and from other branches of SIPTU. There was a Christy Moore and Don Baker concert in aid of the workers, and we’ve seen solidarity actions in Cork and Belfast. All this in a year which has seen high-profile strikes (or averted strike action) by bus drivers, ESB workers, junior doctors, Aer Lingus workers, retail workers in Marks and Spencers and now railway workers. Strike action is, of course, generally the last resort for trade unions, and many workers (difficult to find figures so this is anecdotal, apologies) have been able to secure pay increases in the last while with the assistance of their trade unions, without having to resort to striking. International On the international front, we’ve also seen statements of solidarity from our unions on the ongoing onslaught in Gaza, and Labour Youth has supported the exciting Fight for 15 campaign in the US, which has the potential to change how fast-food workers are treated by their employers, there and here.

Strikes and Sit-ins and Lockouts, Oh My!

Social media Twitter and Facebook have played significant roles in all of the above. There’s been a marked increase of trade union activism on social media in the last two years or so, with many trade unions setting up general or campaign pages, attracting thousands of likes. A number of unions have also developed apps for your phone. Admittedly, it’s easy to overstate the significance of social media activism - it only represents a fraction of what unions do - but it’s still an interesting and welcome trend to see unions reaching out to underrepresented young people. It’s also much easier to keep up with developments in the Trade Unions when they appear in your news feed everyday (particularly developments which otherwise go unreported in the mainstream media. Here are a few FACEBOOK PAGES you might like to like if you haven’t already: Justice for Greyhound workers (2,894 likes) Decency for Dunnes workers (2,581 likes) Support the M&S workers (5,312 likes) End Zero Hour Contracts campaign (625 likes) Fight for 15 - Lucha por 15 WOCC (14,042 likes) Labour Youth Trade Unions (...176 likes) (Yes, you should definitely like and share the last one… *cough*) To conclude, it’s been a really interesting year for the labour movement, with more visible campaigns, and strong shows of solidarity between unions nationally and internationally. We in Labour Youth have also stepped up our game on workers rights and the appointment of Ged Nash TD as “Minister for Labour Youth Concerns” (!) is particularly welcome. Over the next weeks and months there’s going to be a lot of interesting developments in and for the trade union movement. We may see a union-led boycott of Israeli goods. Workers will (finally) have the legal right to organise when the collective bargaining bill is enacted in the Dáil. If the economy continues to improve, we’re likely to see increased pay claims by workers - private and public sector. There are also growing calls by parts of the union movement (and even, I hear, by some employers) to centralise negotiations over wages. It seems unlikely this will lead a return to Social Partnership, and more likely that there will be some kind of agreement brokered between the government and public sector unions, and possibly employers groups as well.

Nine Things You Mightn’t Know About Unions

In this segment, our Trade Union Coordinator Ciara Galvin lists nine things you may not know about trade union organisation, activism and composition in Ireland today… 1) There are more than 50 unions in Ireland and they represent a combined total of more than 830,000 members. 2) Of these, the largest affiliated to Labour is SIPTU. It has over 200,000 members. Other unions currently affiliated include IMPACT Municipal Employees Division, the Transport Salaried Staff Association (TSSA) and UCATT. 3) There are a few different kinds of unions: Vocational unions - these represent one particular type of worker, like people working in retail or in communications, e.g. Mandate, the CWU. General unions - these represent people working in a number of different areas e.g. SIPTU, which has people in manufacturing, construction and a number of other sectors Public sector unions - represent workers employed by the State, or in semi-state organisations (most of which were set up by the state and later privatised) Private sector unions - represent workers employed by businesses, NGOs, and the like. Some General unions operate in both the public and private sectors. 4) These unions are based on one of two models: Servicing model unions, as the name suggests, have officials who provide services for their members - representing them at meetings, assisting them to take cases against their employers, etc. They tend to be more ‘top-down’ and conservative. Campaigning and Organising model unions, by contrast, focus on mobilising people and supporting them to achieve their own ends. They tend to be more ‘bottom-up’ and activist. In reality most unions are a mix of the two, though the increase in trade union activism in Ireland recently could perhaps be attributed to efforts to shift from servicing models to campaigning and organising.

Nine Things You Mightn’t Know About Unions

5) If you’re a student... And your student union is affiliated to USI, you can avail of Support in the workplace from SIPTU. There’s even a freephone number you can call. It isn’t widely publicised, but should be available from your student union. 6) To join a union: You can either contact the union directly, or get in touch with ICTU (the umbrella body) through www.unionconnect.ie and they’ll advise you which union to join. The cost of being a union member depends on your union, and depends on your income. 7) Unemployed people CAN join a union Mandate offer membership for people who are unemployed for a euro a week. Unite are looking at rolling out “community” membership. SIPTU members who become unemployed can stay a member for a much reduced fee. You also don’t have to be a member of a trade union to get involved in the Young Workers’ Network! 8) Although women make up more than 50% of union members, about 90-95% of the union leadership is male. 9) Ireland experienced serious decline in union density during the Celtic Tiger. Although total membership grew, the number of unionised workers as a percentage of the total workforce dropped during the Celtic Tiger era from about 60% in the early 1980s to 45% in the early 1990s to a low point of about 30%. Union density remains particularly low in multinational companies. It’s also lower in the private sector - for example in retail only 1 in 4 workers is in a union. By contrast, it’s very high in some public sector unions - 9 in 10 or more.

Onwards and Upwards

THE LABOUR PARTY IS currently at a challenging time. We have recently elected new leadership and have suffered a major defeat at the local and European elections. The time has come for revival and it is up to Labour Youth to press forward and be at the front of this change. As a section of the party we are in an influential position. We are the youth of the party and the key to its survival and future success. A lot has been done but there is always more. It is up to Labour Youth to push onwards and be at the very front of our partyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fight. As an organisation we are very college-oriented and this is not negative by any means. Colleges and Universities are Chair, UCC Labour hotbeds of political thought and social justice and these are natural areas for Labour Youth to recruit and function in, but we need to expand outside of these areas. We need Youth Officers in every constituency recruiting new members and keeping that vital contact between the local constituency and the National Youth Executive. One of the key problems within the party is the lack of communication between leadership and grassroots. This is an evident problem when Ministers and Parliamentary Labour Party members visit a local area but fail to inform the local constituency or branch of the visit and therefore denying them that vital link of communication. I do think that this is evident to a lesser extent within Labour Youth.

Andrew O Driscoll

Branches both College and constituency based need more interaction with NYE members, but I must be fair in explaining that this interaction goes both ways. Yes we need more visits to branches from NYE members, especially from the Chairperson and Membership Development Officer, but we also need to see more youth members attending national meetings and Labour Youth campaigns and events. If Labour Youth wants to achieve a more influential position within the party then we need to have this level of communication and commitment from our members. A major focus for Labour Youth over the next few years should be recruitment on all fronts. With party popularity dropping and stagnating we need to make sure that we continue to recruit and keep the influx of members steady and constant. Our college branches need to get more active with the other progressive groups within their college and also try to get involved with their student union. Strengthening college branches will be beneficial for the recruitment capabilities of these branches and also grow their influence on and off campus which will boost the organisation as a whole. For our constituency branches we need to work with community organisations, this will gain us new members and establish support for our branches in local communities.

Onwards and Upwards As I have outlined clearly in this article I believe that the expansion of Labour Youth within constituencies outside of colleges to be of the utmost importance for the revival of the party and the future increase in its strength. But this does not apply solely to Labour Youth, the party as a whole must focus on restructuring and recruitment or be forever the runt of a coalition. We need our members to get more active in their own constituencies and their own communities. We need each and every member to go out and ask what you can do to help the party and then proceed to do just that. This party will not survive without its members and it is only thanks to its members that we have accomplished all that we have. Members of Labour Youth have to look beyond the organisation to see how we can move forward as a party and be part of that revival in every local branch that we have members in. I am not claiming that Labour Youth or indeed its members are not already committed in this manner. But I do think that now more than ever Labour Youth are needed in every Labour constituency and that we need to be as active as we can.

The Need for Solidarity in Labour SOLIDARITY IS A WORD that is continuously thrown around by those on the Left. It is a concept for which we strive in the Labour Party. In speeches, at conferences, as part of our core ideology, solidarity is reiterated. Despite this, our party needs to ask itself, to what extent does our solidarity reach?

Grace Williams Chair, UCD Labour

Our roots in the trade unions cement our belief in this act. We stood in solidarity during the 1913 Lockout and pushed for workers’ rights. In the last year, Labour has continued to push for workers’ rights with collective bargaining legislation and the reinstatement of the Joint Labour Committees. We stood for women in Ireland while pushing to legislate for X Case with the Protection of Life during Pregnancy bill. Our belief in solidarity created these results.

However, this year we’ve seen times that have called for solidarity on the Left to be acted upon; troubles that we, as a party, need to be speaking against in accordance with the values which we claim to believe; times that our party has failed in this act. It is with great sadness and frustration that we must acknowledge that Labour was slow to speak in solidarity with the locked out Greyhound workers. Our links with the trade unions and core belief in workers’ rights should promote this bond between our political platform and the unjust circumstances thrust upon these workers. Activists and grassroots members aside, our government ministers have failed to prove their belief in solidarity. To so easily forget the core beliefs upon which Labour was founded is an insult to the everyday, working people upon whose votes our representatives were elected. Another great failing within the parliamentary party has been the lack of our voice in condemning Israeli violence in Gaza. These unjust attacks have violated international law and threaten to continue doing so. To stay silent does not allow Labour to stay neutral. Labour’s silence condones actions which oppress those who are most vulnerable, those who have no voice of their own. Our silence grants the perpetrators impunity and tacitly allows these acts to continue. The Labour Party needs to nail its red flag to the mast and voice the beliefs of its membership. Labour’s future lies in its ability to protect workers, to progress gender equality, to provide a strong welfare state and to strive for equality for all, regardless of the difficulty involved. It lies in the ability to achieve this through solidarity, not only within the party but with the electorate and their communities. The silences within our party are becoming clear. Solidarity is more than a word, it is actions taken to support those who suffer at the hands of inequality and to promote a just and equal society. Although solidarity looks nice on paper, it looks even better in practice.

Why Don’t Economists Stick to the Economy?

IN ACADEMIA, SIMPLE QUESTIONS have a maddening tendency to produce bewildering amounts of different and contradictory answers. The question “what is economics?” is no different. Those seeking a quiet life would be well advised to simply opt for the obvious answer that economics is the study of the economy, or perhaps the reasonably coherent Oxford Dictionaries definition that economics is “the branch of knowledge concerned with the production, consumption, and transfer of wealth.” Unfortunately, many contemporary economists would unhelpfully disagree. A simple definition of a subject turns out to be a very tricky thing indeed to gain agreement on. A 2009 study of definitions of Killian O’Sullivan economics by Roger Backhouse and Steven Madema found that common contemporary economics textbooks would Chair, Trinity Labour variously claim that “economics is apparently the study of the economy, the study of the coordination process, the study of the effects of scarcity, the science of choice, and the study of human behaviour.” This ought to set alarm bells ringing – this suggests that for some economists the study of economics can be very broad indeed. This is precisely the case. Ha-Joon Chang is only half-joking when he writes in his book Economics: The User’s Guide that for many contemporary economists (including some of the most popular ones) economics is about Life, the Universe and Everything – in other words, the Ultimate Question. Leaving aside the fact that any Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fan already knows the answer to this (it’s 42), the sweeping ambition is quite astounding. Take, for example, the immensely popular 2005 book Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. This book claims to explore “the hidden side of everything,” proceeding to apply their version of economics to some problems that traditionally would not be the concern of economists, such as parenting, abortion and crime. Financial Times journalist Tim Harford goes further, titling one of his books The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World. Economics, it would seem, in the hands of some practitioners attempt to explain everything; it is, as Chang writes, as if economics suffers from “a serious case of megalomania.” And yet, who really has faith in economists to be so all-knowing? The disastrous failures of the mainstream discipline of economics before (and during, and after) the global financial crisis are obvious to most people. Public faith in a discipline that not only failed to avert disaster but in many instances actively abetted it is understandably low. Why such vast epistemic confidence, in such contrast to the reality we now see? How did economics become the study of anything?

Why Don’t Economists Stick to the Economy?

At the heart of this modern approach to economics is the belief that economics is not just the study of economic conditions and processes, but rather a science of human behaviour. In 1932, Lionel Robbins, a neoclassical economist, defined economics as "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This has important implications, because there is little to stop this being applied beyond the realm of markets and economic activity. Economics is explained not by what it studies but how it studies. It is all about studying how individuals seek to maximise their welfare or utility, through rational choices regarding scarce resources. Gary Becker’s 1976 work, The Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, is the main statement of this approach, and Becker explicitly claims the ‘economic approach’ of assuming (a priori, of course) that people act to maximise their welfare through rational choices can explain practically all human behaviour. Apart from the spectacular arrogance of this approach, perhaps the most notable effect on economics of defining the subject by a method rather than by subject matter is that by broadening the subject matter, the approach of studying economics becomes narrower. What this approach leaves out is important; what room is there for history, or ethics, or culture, or approaches that don’t Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes rely on obscure mathematical models, when all you need to understand is a particular view of human behaviour and how it plays out? It is no wonder that the students of the Post-Crash Economics Society at Manchester University (or economics undergraduates in universities elsewhere) complain that economics syllabuses are too narrow and ignorant of alternative approaches; after all, why bother learning about Marx or Keynes when all you need to know is how to analyse choices? The consequences of this approach can be damaging. It undoubtedly contributes to what Michael D. Higgins identified as a worrying “acceptance of a view of politics, society and the economy as separated out from each other” and an economic discourse that is seen to have “nothing to do with social critique or a discourse of ethics.” This is profoundly damaging to public life, as it is an approach that is tone deaf to any concept of the public. Market norms and values are seen as the best way of maximising individuals’ welfare, and so this approach bolsters the neoliberal domination of politics and public discourse, with market approaches and norms seeping in to areas that no-one would have dreamed of thirty years ago and with the continuing drive on the Right to privatise and atomise anything and everything. Understanding and rejecting this ought to be the work of the Left, as part of discarding the intellectual foundations that led to the present crisis.

Remembering the First World War

Shane Folan

THROUGHOUT THE LAST YEAR, we have seen a lot of pieces being written on the First World War and I’m sure there will be many more to come over the next few years. As it is the centenary of the outbreak of the war we seem to be increased discourse about Ireland’s role in the war and whether or not it should be celebrated. One of the main problems with the discussion is about whether or not it is right to call the Irish soldiers in the First World War heroes, or if they were fighting for an imperialist cause and nothing else. It is possible for people to remember those that fought in the First World War without glorifying the war, its causes, or the deaths of millions of people.

The United Kingdom (which of course included Ireland at the time) saw a huge economic surge at the start of the war, production increasing exponentially to feed the war effort. Ireland saw a reasonable share of this, with the ship building industry in Belfast increasing, and the linen industries in the north of the country also gaining very well from these contracts. Throughout the rest of the island agriculture benefitted hugely as a result of the war, as the old cliché goes “an army marches on its stomach”. Outside of Belfast however, industry did not fare so well. Dublin and Cork did not see a huge increase in productivity nor employment. In fact, due to the House of Commons’ legislation restricting the consumption and making of alcohol as the war rolled on, many people in Dublin in particular found themselves out of a job.

Dublin Bay North

Unemployment was rife by the time the First World War broke out, and the British Army needed soldiers. It provided a way for young Irish men to earn a wage. It meant food on the table for their families. It meant the hopes of a better life for their children. It had nothing to do with national pride – it was about survival. Thousands of young Irish men signed up for the Army as a result of there being no alternative. Given the strain that the Lockout had put on the workers (which had ended only six months before the outbreak of the war), the comparably good pay in the British Army was a lifeline to thousands of workers across the country. This view does not mean that one is supporting the war aims of the British Army, or indeed any imperialist army at the turn of the century. Far from that, one can still actively decry the imperialist nature of the war. In fact one should. However, we must in my view remember what the motivations of the Irish men fighting in the British Army were, and by and large it was nothing more than survival. Remember these people. There tends to be a relation in a family who was in the First World War. They were not traitors to their country, they were not imperialists who wanted to crush other nations. They were by and large workers who wanted to feed their families. Never forget that they were driven to that end, and let us make sure that no one should ever have to go to that extreme ever again.

The Case for a Living Wage A MUCH-NEEDED DISCUSSION is beginning to take place on the need to tackle income inequality. President Obama now describes income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time”. The Oxfam report “Working for the Few” shows that income inequality is worsening in Ireland and throughout the world. Shockingly, just 85 people control a staggering 50% of the world’s wealth. Key to tackling income inequality is tackling low wages.

Ciarán Garrett National Chair

The introduction of a living wage would be a strong commitment to decent living in our society and enable workers to afford the basic requirements of everyday living. Eurostat statistics show that 20.7% of the workforce is low paid. Shockingly, one in four people now suffer from multiple cases of deprivation. Not only would the introduction of a living wage have huge societal benefits; it would also be an economically beneficial move.

Boris Johnson, the Conservative Mayor of London, notes the success of the living wage in London in improving living conditions and stimulating economic growth: “the Living Wage is not only morally right, but makes good business sense too.” In fact he has made it his New Year’s resolution for 2014 to attract more support for the living wage. One of the biggest challenges facing the economy is the collapse in consumer demand. Ireland has witnessed the biggest fall in demand in Europe. The fall in consumer demand doesn’t benefit workers because they face job losses, it doesn’t benefit businesses because they face reduced profits, nor does it benefit the government which faces reduced VAT revenue and more social welfare spending. Nowadays you hear a multitude of commentators talk about stimulating the economy, and introducing a living wage would be one of the most effective ways to do just that. Once people start spending more it benefits business, employees, job-seekers and VAT returns for the government. The successful introduction of a $17 an hour living wage at the large US supermarket chain Costco shows that, at a time when its low-wage competitors are struggling, a business which pays a living wage can be highly profitable and keep prices low for consumers. An argument often brought up by some in the business lobby is that Ireland already has too high a minimum wage and that employers cannot afford to pay extra. This was the same line of argument used to oppose employers paying sick pay, holiday pay and over-time, in all these cases, businesses adapted and living standards improved. A study by NERI shows employers’ minimum hourly labour costs in Ireland are actually below the European average. Labour costs are the total amount of money the employer pays each hour an employee works. It includes wages and employers’ PRSI contributions. In Denmark it costs an employer €39.61 for each employee per hour, while in Ireland it costs €24.57. Research also shows that business profits in Ireland have increased by 21% since 2007, at a much faster pace than anywhere else in Europe. The argument that employers can’t afford to

The Case for a Living Wage pay a living wage should be dismissed in the context of lower-than-European-average labour costs, high increases in business profits, and the increased benefits to business of paying a living wage. Employers shouldn’t see a living wage for employees as a burden, but rather as an investment. An employer may think paying their staff low wages will increase their profits, but when this becomes the dominant trend across the economy it does not benefit businesses as workers, who are consumers too, don’t have enough surplus income to spend. That’s why there is a high level of support from businesses in the UK for a living wage. Over 100 high street business in the UK support the living wage. Unite the Union estimates that increasing the minimum wage to just 2007 levels would grow the economy by €1 billion and create 17,000 jobs. Introducing a living wage would also save the government and tax-payers a lot of money. Currently the government is subsidising low-paid workers. Last year the government spent €161 million on the supplementary social welfare allowance, €214 million on family income support and €400 million on rent allowance. These measures support low-income workers with the daily cost of living. Rather than the government spending hundreds of millions each year subsidising low pay, which could be spent building new schools and hospitals, it should introduce a living wage so low-paid workers are no longer dependent on income supports from the State. A living wage would make a real difference to our society. It makes sense for workers, businesses and the government. For too long the social narrative in Ireland of encouraging speculation and focusing too much on what’s best for an elite few rather than what’s best for society has allowed income inequality to widen. The introduction of a living wage would do what’s best for society and create a threshold of decent living.

Irish Travellers are an Ethnic Minority IRISH TRAVELLERS ARE AN ethnic minority, it’s about time we recognised this.

Jeni Gartland

At Labour Party Conference last year, Labour Equality, supported by Labour Youth, brought a motion calling for the Irish Government to recognise Traveller ethnicity. The motion passed through the conference with overwhelming support. It was also supported by Deputy Aodhán Ó Ríordáin, Senator Ivana Bacik, the Irish Traveller Movement and Pavee Point. Recognition of ethnic status has been set as a priority for newly appointed Junior Minister for Equality, New Communities and Culture, Aodhán Ó Ríordáin.

Despite all of the international pressure, the overwhelming academic evidence, the recommendations from various human rights and civil liberties groups and recommendation from the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Justice the Irish State has failed to recognise Irish Travellers as an ethnic minority.

Campaigns Officer

From an academic perspective, Irish Travellers fulfil the sociological and anthropological definition of ethnicity. Put simply, ethnicity can be defined by the following factors: “biological selfperpetuation; shared fundamental cultural values; overt unity of cultural form with implied social separation and own field of communication or interaction.” Irish Travellers meet all of these criteria for the following reasons: Biological self-perpetuation: Membership of the Traveller Community is defined by family history and typically, Irish Travellers marry within the community. Irish Travellers have shared cultural values which are distinctive from other population groups. These include a tradition of nomadism, values of religion, shared music and stories, kinship, occupations and lifestyle. There is a social separation implied between Irish Travellers and the rest of the population. They also have a long shared history. They are self-defined as Travellers and the rest of society sees them as such. Irish Travellers also have their own language called Gammon or Cant, which means they have their own field of communication. Based on this definition, Irish Travellers are an ethnic minority. Irish Travellers are also recognised as an ethnic minority group in Europe, the United States and in the United Kingdom. This means that, when an Irish Traveller is in Newry they have ethnic recognition, but across the border in Dundalk they are no longer recognised.

Irish Travellers are an Ethnic Minority The Irish State has also been scrutinised by many International organisations including CERD of the United Nations and ECRI of the United Nations. Many human rights groups have also condemned the Irish State’s active denial of ethnicity, including Amnesty International. The Irish State’s stance is also in breach of the Good Friday Agreement. Probably the strongest, and most important argument of all, is that Irish Travellers recognise themselves as an ethnic minority. Traveller advocacy groups, the Irish Traveller Movement and Pavee Point, have been lobbying and campaigning on this issue for decades. Surely the Irish State should respect this? The treatment of Irish Travellers by the State has historically been appalling. From the Commission on ‘Itinerancy’ in the 1960s to the failure to provide Irish Travellers with adequate culturally appropriate accommodation to the institutionalised discrimination in State bodies, Irish Travellers are the most isolated and marginalised group in Irish society. They have been defined as deviants or misfits or failed settled people that need to be rehabilitated or ‘assimilated’ into settled society. Recognising ethnicity is not a quick fix and won’t change a deeply held mindset. It will however send a strong message to the rest of society. A message that says Irish Travellers are people too and deserve to be respected.

Misinterpreting Globalisation ONE OF THE MOST frequently invoked explanations for rising economic inequality and the related crisis in left-wing ideology has been the vaguely understood phenomenon of ‘globalisation’. However, the use of the term is often quite misleading and even inaccurate.

Neil Warner International Officer

One of the main reasons globalisation is invoked as the primary cause of these problems, in a political culture still heavily dominated by a neo-liberal, pro-business consensus, is that it serves the purposes of those who want to maintain the status quo. This works on a number of levels.

Firstly, bringing up of ‘globalisation’ creates the image of a process so massive in scale and significance that it is irresistible and its consequences are unavoidable. How can a bunch of ordinary activists in a single city or country anywhere hope to compete with such a mighty force? Secondly, it is not only that we cannot hope to resist ‘globalisation’ – we should not want to. To begin with the very term itself is psychologically appealing – who, after all, can really be against the closer integration of people around the world? More materially, it directly connects the dilemmas and difficulties of ordinary people in the developed world to the progress of the developing world. The left is in a dilemma and workers in Europe must accept less, we are constantly told, because we need to compete with the rising economies of the developing world. To oppose ‘globalisation’ is, consequently, to oppose what is genuinely perhaps the most positive development in recent world history – the increase in the living standards of ordinary people in the developing world. The reality is that a large part of ‘globalisation’ narrative, and in particular the manner in which it is connected to rising inequality and the crisis of the political left, is combination of gross simplification and conflation of different trends. ‘Globalisation’ is frequently associated with a supposed acceleration in global trade and the global mobility of goods and capital. In reality though, developments in the last few decades have been much more complex than the label of ‘globalisation’ seems to imply. The argument that developed economies face rising inequality due to increasingly intense trade and competition from low-wage economies in the developing world is especially spurious. The jobs that are being created these days in Asia are largely in sectors with which the service sector-driven developed world economies do not have a large stake and have not had for quite a long time. The most recent analyses of rising income inequality in developed countries have fairly consistently found little or no significant correlation between wage competition from developing countries and rising inequality. The implied connection between expanding global trade and inequality can also be refuted through both cross-country and historical comparison. Cross-country comparison is the most

Misinterpreting Globalisation glaring. Of developed countries, the United States has experienced by far the most dramatic increase in income inequality in the last few decades. The United States is, at the same time, by far and away the most internally self-sufficient economy in the world. By contrast, income equality has been most resilient (though it has still suffered a lot) in some of most open economies in the world - notably the Nordic countries. Historically, export shares in developed economies expanded rapidly in the ‘golden age’ of Keynesianism, social democracy and falling income inequality from the 1950s to 1970s. In contrast, while export shares as a proportion of GDP in this part of the world in the last few decades have continued to grow, the rate of growth has decelerated significantly – sometimes even verging on stagnation. Actually, the problem is a kind of deglobalisation

COMPARED TO THE LAST few decades, the periods from about 1870 to 1914 and from 1945 to the early 1970s were witness to a far more rapid pace of overall international economic integration than the most recent phase. Yet both these periods also probably saw an increase in income equality within industrialised countries (though not between countries, and not in the rest of the world).

The key difference with these periods, however, was that they combined this system of economic integration with simultaneous political integration. This makes perfect sense – pretty much throughout human history, economic integration has been accompanied by the simultaneous geographical expansion of political units that both regulated and helped to stimulate these wider scales of economic activity. Before 1914, this role was performed by the various European imperial systems combined with a relatively stable monetary system which linked different currencies to a fixed amount of gold (the “gold standard”). Both of these elements of the international order were pretty awful in many ways, but they did ensure a significant amount political control over the integration of the global economy. The collapse of this regime with the outbreak of World War I played a large part in the economic and political misery of the subsequent three decades – which saw a reversal in the process of global economic integration. After the Second World War, the capitalist world again became regulated with the “Bretton Woods” system of fixed exchange rates and capital controls backed up by the United States, whose dollar remained fixed to the gold standard. In 1971, under pressure from increasing international capital flows and the balance of payments and budgetary deficits it had built up fighting the Vietnam war, the United States went off the gold standard – triggering the overall collapse of the system of fixed exchange rates within a couple of years and the end of the Bretton Woods system. Except for the collapse of the Soviet Union, this was probably the most important event in world history since the end of the Second World War. Yet it isn’t even on Reeling in the Years.

Misinterpreting Globalisation Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, economies have been far more at the mercy of rapid inflows and outflows of increasingly unmanageable financial capital and speculation against their floating currencies. When political systems are not large enough to regulate economic activity at the appropriate level, the consequence is normally one form or another of gangsterism – people’s lives become dominated by the chaotic will of private actors rather than regulated politicaleconomic systems. As political control over the world economy has shrunk, the vacuum has been filled primarily by financial capital and multinational corporations. Such a collapse of political control also tends to go hand-in-hand with a substantial decline in economic activity. Growth rates in the developed world since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system have been dismal compared to the “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s. There are probably many reasons for this, but it seems reasonable to argue that the decline of international management of economic activity has played a major role. The post-war achievements of European social democracy depended more than anything else on economic growth. Such growth allowed a compromise to be forged between capital and labour whereby distributional conflicts could be neglected due to the rapidly expanding size of the pie to be shared out. As growth has weakened, so capital has become increasingly insistent on preserving more of the shrinking gains for itself. “Globalisation” of a very particular kind

THOUGH THE PACE AND nature of the integration the real world economy in itself has been significantly over-exaggerated and misrepresented, corporations and finance in-and-of themselves have internationalised in a very substantial way. This is due to two narrow areas where a kind globalisation narrative does have some accuracy.

Firstly, whereas as the growth in international trade over the last few decades has been greatly exaggerated, the growth in international financial capital flows has been genuinely spectacular. Secondly, there has been the expansion and increasing sophistication of transnational corporations. This is accompanied by what British socialist economist Stuart Holland describes as the growing ‘mesoeconomic’ power of corporations over the nation state. As the power of democratic governments to coordinate effectively has fragmented, they have been increasingly subject to the will of corporations who can operate at an international level and mobile financial capital that can wreck a particular economy in an instant by moving elsewhere. Once again, this has general historical parallels. When systems of organisation, culture and authority are fragmented, power tends towards the small elite able to collaborate and operate on a more extensive level while manipulating the parochialised interests of everyone else into a counter-productive competition for the resources bestowed upon them by cooperating elites. This is how oligarchy can develop.

Misinterpreting Globalisation

What Can We Do?

THE FIRST LESSON TO draw from all of this is that the power of national government to act in a genuinely egalitarian or social-democratic way is not as doomed as many simplistic theses of globalisation imply. What is needed is a revival of international political integration to fit with the extent to which economic activity exists on an international scale. In other words we needs a ‘reglobalisation’ or at the very least a re-internationalisation of politics, both in the sense of institutions of governance and in the sense of political activism.

The fact that this has been done to some extent before should give us confidence that establishing at least initial frameworks for international governance is not a utopian vision. Possibilities for action are also enhanced by the fact much of the economic integration that has taken place in the last few decades has been regional rather than global. This means that the problems produced by the crisis in governance of the global economy can be significantly alleviated by greater integration of much more embedded regional institutions such as the EU. In terms of designing more global form of economic governance, we can probably go a long way simply by turning back to John Maynard Keynes. In the debates about the nature of the proposed post-war economic system in Bretton Woods in 1944, Keynes proposed a monetary system based around an international currency with a fixed exchange rate and with incentives for both creditor and debtor nations to avoid destabilising balance-of-payments surpluses or deficits. The ultimate Bretton Woods system was unfortunately designed in such a way as to suit the interests of the USA and its desire for a special hegemonic position. If Keynes’s ideas had been followed, the problems of imbalances in economic activities and over-dependence on the US which brought down the Bretton Woods system might have been avoided. Keynes’s ideas, and the updated ideas of Keynesian and post-Keynesian economists for a new global system of economic management, should now be looked at again. However, the experience of the last few decades and even the last few years shows that we cannot rely on the fragmented and increasingly compromised interests of national rulers to pursue to a fundamentally cooperative approach. This is why solving these problems requires not only the globalisation of governance but the globalisation of political activity. Fragmented, oligarchic systems such as the one we have now can only be challenged in two ways. Firstly, either through the rule of a single, overarching hegemonic such as the United States or previously the UK – no longer a possibility due to the decline in American power, and not really desirable either. Or secondly, through cooperation between the exploited majority who are traditionally turned against each other through their clientelistic dependence on their oligarchic elites. In other words, the current crisis of the left and rising inequality will only be properly tackled when democratic tendencies across the world come to operate as part of the same movement and demand new forms of global political and economic governance that serves their collective interests. There is no other way.