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'Your Job is Yours as a Right. Fight and Fight Again for It!'
national |
worker & community struggles and protests |
feature
Tuesday September 07, 2004 01:57 by seedot
The language of the IWU. Two journalists from Indymedia went to meet Ray O'Reilly from the Independent Workers Union, along with a couple of IWU members who work in Dublin Bus. This article covers part of that interview, the discussion on the Irish Trade Union movement and its constituent parts.
"Your job is yours as a right." To read this in a trade union statement makes you feel like it must be labour history, not a letter drafted by the IWU to be sent to the Aer Lingus Workers about their current predicament. And yet Ireland's youngest union is the one that was smart enough to register the internet domain: union.ie and the letter is up on their website. They have overcome the main legal hurdle to establishing a viable trade union (a negotiating license) and have an evangelical belief in trade unionism that expresses itself in language that comes straight from the 19th century proletariat that gave birth to the movement. Ray talks of "...restoring the Trade Union movement as the organised arm and voice of working people."
On their website the IWU display the images of Connolly and Larkin, which is perhaps particularly justified given that they are possibly the only union using the language of Connolly and Larkin today. They see themselves as reclaiming the labour movement from the bureaucrats.
When Ray talks about Connolly and Larkin turning in their graves if they were to know of what became of the ITGWU (which merged into SIPTU), he focuses on the issues that have coloured many people's views of SIPTU , especially in the airport and their sweetheart deal in Luas. Unions that manage redundancies for state companies and weaken their membership by removing their right to strike bring out more than the cynicism that most of us feel, his language reflects the anger felt at the state of the movement. The obvious question about working within the existing structures focuses on the need to have a union that was not in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, which is classified as "an arm of the state."
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