Text of Solidarity leaflet on strike action being taken by 300,000 public sector workers.
Strike for substantial wage increases, not “negotiations”
Solidarity and Ruth Coppinger TD stand foursquare with workers demanding substantial pay rises. Landslide votes for industrial action by teachers, nurses, council workers and civil servants shows the depth of feeling.
Over 300,000 public sector workers on strike demonstrates our huge potential power and influence. This is a right-wing, anti-worker government, so we need all of that power to put them under intense pressure, if we are to win significant inflation-busting pay increases.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass
Unions should not just use the one-day strike as a lever to force negotiations. That approach leads to minimal pay increases, which this Government will try to link to productivity that squeezes even more out of us. Our focus now should not be on negotiations, but on more action and for longer and spreading the action to maximise the pressure.
All workers should push their unions to escalate the action around a concrete demand of a double-digit pay rise – for example, a claim of even up to 20%would be entirely justified given our loss in living standards – something that would actually make a dent in the cost-of-living crisis. Any offer of negotiations in advance of workers getting the opportunity to really rattle the Government should be dismissed for the manoeuvre that it is. The lesson from the fuel protests is you win nothing without serious action.
Remember, the State will run a budget surplus of €6.7 billion in 2026 and another of €9.6 billion in 2027, so it’s not that the money isn’t there; it’s an ideological, anti-working-class stance.
Instead of seeing the 14th as warning strikes to win negotiations, we should now move to organise more serious, coordinated action. Indeed, the unions should organise and encourage all private sector workers, those in unions and the many who are not, to also join the action to force serious concessions from the private sector.
We’re not outnumbered, we’re out organised – Malcolm X
Trade unions have unfortunately adopted a conciliatory approach that sees the Government and employers as social partners, rather than the reality – they are the establishment intent on maximising profits for big business at our expense. This has resulted in the union movement being less and less a factor in Irish life.
If we are to confront the nightmare conditions that capitalism today is imposing on us, including the grotesque wealth inequality between the billionaires and the billions of people, this needs to change.
Like many governments, the establishment in Ireland is moving to the right, influenced by the big tech sponsored far right, which has emerged globally. They put vulture funds before housing needs, so while we can’t afford a home, the profits of the State’s largest corporate landlord, IRES-REIT, tripled; and while 70% of young people plan on emigrating, destructive big tech data centres are welcomed.
Unite the resistance into a new progressive left movement
Unions cannot stand idly by, they must help build a fighting political challenge to capitalism and help build a new broad movement to unite working-class people. James Connolly and Jim Larkin were the fiercest critics of the narrow focus of trade unions that existed at their time. They saw the urgency for the labour movement to take up every instance of injustice and oppression of the working class in all its diversity.
Imagine the potential if the unions mobilised their 500,000 members into a fighting force not just on the cost of living but for affordable homes for all; to confront the climate crisis and campaign on a worker-led just transition to green energy; to follow the lead of the heroic Italian dock workers who refused to handle weapons used in Gaza genocide; to resist the epidemic of gender-based violence and attacks on the LGBTQ+ community; and to decisively push back on the far-right, fascist threat who are spreading their racist poison throughout the country.
The trade union movement should not be seen as separate from these burgeoning struggles, but can be an important ingredient helping their crystallisation into an organised and sustained fightback against exploitation and oppression. That’s the type of anti-capitalist, socialist movement Ruth Coppinger TD and Solidarity are trying to build, and we urge anyone who agrees to get in touch.
We say:
- Yes to double-digit, inflation-busting wage increases to really tackle the cost-of-living crisis
- Yes to escalation of industrial action, and broadening to private sector and unorganised workers
- Yes to a new fighting trade union movement that breaks with the pandering social partnership approach
- Yes to bringing together all the resistance on all the key issues into a new united radical left force that breaks with capitalism in Ireland, and extends solidarity to those fighting for change around the world
