Tag Archives: Labour
#Budget2016: Thatcher would be proud
Posted on October 13, 2015 by Stephanie Lord
Use this Feminist Ire Budget Calculator to assess how #Budget2016 affects you!
Are you a multinational company paying little to no corporation tax, or one of the richest people in Ireland? You are? Excellent, then you'll have even more money.
Are you an ordinary person earning an average wage or a person surviving on social welfare payments? You are? If you're waged, you may come out with a fiver extra a week but the Government will want it back from you in property tax and water charges, and the increase to minimum wage probably won't mean much because Labour (the party of work) haven't done anything about zero hour contracts.
Are you living in your car with your child because you're scared to go into a homeless hostel? You will get €5 extra in your children's allowance. NAMA will fund private developers to build houses now but tough shit you'll never be able to afford it.
Budget 2016 is an exercise in appalling political cynicism. People voted for Labour and Fine Gael because they wanted something different. What they got was years of austerity. Howlin and Noonan were at pains to tell us that this was a pro-family non-austerity budget but it's just more of the same. The great big giveaway budget we've heard so much about means people entitled to fuel allowance will get an extra €2.50 in each payment. Congratulations, that will get you an extra briquette each week, burn it wisely!
The extra €5 a week in child benefit will do nothing to meaningfully address the quality of life that children living in poverty currently have. It is not an investment in children, it's an investment in electioneering soundbites that members of Labour and Fine Gael will use when they're dressing up their brutal neoliberal politics as warm and fuzzy family friendly economics.The income disregard of those on JobSeekers Transition Allowance has been increased, but it won't make much difference to one parent families who are really struggling. You can't tell people you want to improve families' lives when you don't invest in childcare and afterschool care. Two weeks paternity leave is welcome but it is not going to make it easier for women to work.
What tiny increases that have been given are barely fit to call crumbs from the table of the corporate bodies and their private developer mates and landlords who have inflicted utter misery on people in Ireland for decades. The Government have given a tiny amount to everyone in an effort to buy the election, but not everyone needs a tiny amount. The 1,500 children living in direct provision who receive €9.60 a week- a payment that hasn't been increased in sixteen years – they need more. The 1,496 children living in emergency accommodation need more. The Traveller families living in dangerous conditions, forgotten and dismissed as if their lives are considered disposable by this Government; they need more.
They are telling us they're giving €900m extra for the health service when in real terms it's about €100m which isn't even enough to provide the same level of service in 2016. People will still die on trolleys. They're allocating the minimum number of extra teachers to cope with increasing numbers of children that are going to school and have the nerve to dress this up as a great policy move. As if providing their bare minimum of teaching staff was a gift to the population of children under twelve, thousands of whom will still attend school in a prefab.
Labour and Fine Gael gave commitments to not raise student contribution fees before the last election. They have raised them to €3,000 and actively pushed students out of education, not to mention how they made it more difficult for students to get grants in the first place a few years ago. They give with one hand and take with the other. There is a vague commitment to invest €3m in the Student Assistance Fund to provide support to struggling students however the exact figure won't be confirmed until Spring 2016. The number of recipients of SAF monies has gone from 7,681 students in 2009 to 15,166 in 2014 which has resulted in an actual reduction in monies allocated to each student in real terms. The government persist in dressing up paltry sums and tell us that they're doing vulnerable people a favour.
There's no increase in the basic rates of social welfare payment or to dole payments to under 26s. I still can't figure out how those under 26 need to eat less than the rest of us, but I'm all ears if someone in Labour wants to fill me in.
For every euro that the Government has given away in capital gains and corporation tax, it is money taken away from the people that actually need it. It is a shameful insult to the people to tell them that this budget is a good thing when the biggest beneficiaries from it will be the likes of Facebook and Google and other multinationals who'll be handed even more tax avoidance mechanisms.
The gloating speeches from government benches were stomach churning. That might sound a bit hyperbolic, but there is something genuinely very nauseating about watching Ministers bleat on week in week out about how we could combat bullying in schools, and then they sit and sneer from the government benches. Richard Boyd Barrett only has to stand up for the snide comments to start. If some of Labour suddenly started pelting him with lumps of chewing gum one of these days, it wouldn't come as a surprise to me.
To make it worse, Ministers and their TD colleagues now expect cookies and a pat on the back for allocating €17million to homeless services when they allocated €50million to commemorations. It will take you 57 years to be reached on the housing list? Diddums, wrap yourself in this copy of the Proclamation to keep warm. Your autistic child doesn't have an SNA? Well that's too bad, but here have a tricolour instead. There's always a lot of squabbling among Irish politicos about what the leaders of the Rising would have wanted but you really don't need to be a genius to know that James Connolly would probably say that ending homelessness would be a more fitting commemoration of the ideals of the Proclamation than this. On the other hand, Margaret Thatcher would find it quite fitting.
@stephie08
Posted in capitalism, Dodgy stats, Education, Equality, feminism, Health, Politics, The family and tagged feminism, Ireland, Labour, Labour Party, politics, poverty. Bookmark the permalink.
The Irish trade union movement throws sex workers under a bus
Posted on September 9, 2012 by Wendy Lyon
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions is an umbrella organisation representing nearly all the active trade unions in Ireland, north and south. A full list of its member unions can be found here (by industry sector) or here (alphabetically).
ICTU has made a submission to the Irish government's public consultation on the prostitution laws. As you can see here, where their submission is reproduced is full, most of it is just a cut-and-paste job of text sent to them by the Turn Off The Red Light campaign, which seeks the introduction of the Swedish model. But there is one part of ICTU's original contribution which I found remarkable. A few paragraphs down the submission cites – clearly for the purpose of endorsing – the view of the Technical, Electrical & Engineering Union's General Secretary that
prostitution could not be considered "work"
ICTU didn't invent this view, of course. But it strikes me as taking on a much graver significance when held by trade unionists than by, say, radical feminists or religious puritans. Because the corollary of prostitution not being work is, of course, that the people engaged in it aren't workers – and are therefore not entitled to the rights that trade unions (theoretically) exist to defend. Effectively, what they're saying to sex workers who want those rights is: piss off, and call us when you've found a real job.
This position puts ICTU at odds with the International Labour Organization, to which it is of course affiliated. While the ILO takes an officially neutral stance on the legal status of sex work, it has made abundantly clear that it recognises the sex industry as a de facto economic sector, and people who sell sex as engaging in a form of labour. In its groundbreaking 1998 report The Sex Sector: The Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia, for example, editor Lin Lean Lim proposes that
For those adult individuals who freely choose sex work, the policy concerns should focus on improving their working conditions and social protection, and ensuring that they are entitled to the same labour rights and benefits as other workers.
The international standards developed by the ILO also reflect this position – albeit impliedly rather than explicitly, in their frequent reference to "all branches of economic activity" (my emphasis). The 1981 Occupational Safety and Health Convention is an example.
And what about the jurisdictions which have actually incorporated those standards into their own laws around sex work, such as New Zealand?
Abel, Fitzgerald and Brunton, "The Impact of the Prostitution Reform Act on the Health and Safety of Sex Workers" (2007)
The phenomenal figures in the last three rows of that table are the consequence of legislation which was expressly designed to treat sex work as work – legislation, in other words, designed to do exactly what ICTU says the law shouldn't do. And thus ICTU, which is a trade union body hence theoretically a workers' rights organisation, would reject a framework agreed to be rights-protective by over 90% of the workers operating within it, because they don't consider them "workers" to begin with. ICTU policy would take those rights away from them.
I've been racking my brain trying to think of a parallel to this extraordinary situation, and I'm honestly stymied. Even considering the obvious context – disapproval of prostitution as a matter of principle – I can't think of another sector in which the "solution" would involve the wholesale rejection of labour rights for those involved. I cut my political teeth in anti-war and anti-nuclear campaigning, and I don't recall anything remotely comparable to this. We may have wanted to decommission the bases and power plants but we never said labour law shouldn't apply to people working at them.
Nor can ICTU's position be justified on the basis that sex work isn't really a choice. The term "work" may be deemed inappropriate for actual forced labour, the labour of someone who is literally enslaved – but ICTU, like all but the most fanatical fringes of the anti-sex work movement, don't seem to think that most in the sex trade fall into this category. Instead, their submission refers to the "poverty, past history of abuse or limited life choices" that push people into prostitution. But ICTU don't see it as "not work" when poverty and limited options push people into unappealing jobs outside the sex sector – and they would never dream of opposing legislation to give those workers labour rights.
In some respects, this betrayal isn't really a surprise: the Irish trade union movement has a long history of selling out Irish workers, especially those at the margins. (They also have a history of an undemocratic, top-down style of leadership which seems to be reflected here as well: nobody I know in any of the ICTU-affiliated unions was asked for their opinion of this submission before it went in.) But summarily excluding a whole sector of the economy from their remit, and refusing to defend the labour rights of the (particularly vulnerable) people dependent on it? That's a new low for them, and it's a shocking one.
Posted in Sex work and tagged ICTU, Ireland, Labour, prostitution consultation, workers' rights. Bookmark the permalink.
Questioning quotas
Posted on November 27, 2011 by Wendy Lyon
The question of gender quotas in politics raised its head in Ireland again last week, as Labour TD Joanna Tuffy – who seems to fancy herself something of a maverick, at least when it doesn't require her to actually defy the party whip – went all over the media arguing against the consensus that seemingly all parties have signed up to. We have a low rate of female representation in our legislature, despite all the main parties having some sort of internal strategy to promote women's candidacy, so it's not surprising that many believe it's time to move beyond voluntary codes. The Programme for Government of the current coalition states that for future elections, funding for political parties will be tied to the percentage of female candidates they run.
Tuffy has made no secret of her opposition to this policy, and apparently it isn't only quotas she objects to. Earlier this month an email went around to the female parliamentarians, proposing a meeting to discuss what steps they could take to promote women's participation in politics. Tuffy replied, cc'ing not only the recipients of the original email but every male parliamentarian as well (as if she was exposing some naughty secret being hidden from them), saying that she would not take part in any meeting from which men were excluded. Predictably, she compared it to men holding a meeting and excluding women, and suggested that gender was irrelevant to their roles as public representatives. That the presence of men might hinder a full and frank discussion as to why women sometimes don't feel comfortable in politics – possibly including, for example, the boorish and lecherous behaviour of certain male politicians (something I've experienced myself) – didn't seem to occur to her or, if it did, she obviously didn't think it was important.
Last week she addressed the quota issue directly in an opinion piece titled Gender quotas do women no favours – and undermine democracy. Her arguments are mostly pretty weak, but I'm sure they've been forensically picked apart elsewhere so I'll just briefly highlight the glaring flaws:
Gender quotas bypass the voter's right to decide, and impose a conclusion on him or her…The proposed quotas will mean that candidates will be ruled out on grounds of gender, and legislation will make such discrimination mandatory. This appears to conflict with Article 16.1.3 of the Constitution, which states that no law shall be enacted placing any citizen under disability or incapacity for membership of the Dáil on grounds of gender.
I would accept the validity of these arguments if there was a quota on the number of women that had to be elected. But that's not what the government is proposing. Political parties will have to select more female candidates but the voter is under no obligation to elect them. Equally, a candidate is under no obligation to run for any particular party (or indeed, for any party at all): if a man can't get selected for one party because of the gender quota he can still run for another party, or as an independent. If this was the US, where it's the voters who select the party's candidates and independents almost never have a hope, Tuffy would have a point here. But not under the Irish electoral system.
Which isn't to say the Supreme Court might not ultimately agree with her – since their ruling that it's ok for Portmarnock Golf Club to discriminate against women as long as it defines itself as not a golf club but rather a men's club that happens to play golf, I've given up expecting logic from them in equality decisions – but it's certainly not self-evident that they will, as Tuffy seems to think.
She next asserts that
gender quotas will give party leaders more control over candidate selection.
It's a weak argument, made weaker by the lack of any explanation as to how or why they will do so. First of all, anyone who thinks Irish party leaders don't already have all the control they need over candidate selection has, IMHO, a very naive view of how electoral politics actually works in this country. Secondly, this argument could work both ways: quotas could actually lessen party leaders' control where too many of the favoured candidates were of a single gender. I suppose what she's getting at is that under a quota system it isn't simply a case of running the candidate who gets the most votes at the selection convention, but it isn't as simple as that under our present system either. I doubt Tuffy is really unaware of all the manipulation that goes on behind the scenes at those "conventions".
She continues with:
even if no woman had ever lost out because of gender quotas, that would not make them right. Positive discrimination is discrimination all the same.
Broken down, this argument goes like this: Discrimination is wrong; quotas are a type of discrimination; therefore quotas are wrong. It's similar to one of the most annoyingly simplistic anti-choice arguments (the taking of human life is wrong; the foetus is a human life; therefore abortion is wrong). It reaches its conclusion by assuming that everyone agrees with its premises, unconditionally and without any need to justify them.
The problem of course is that there are plenty of circumstances in which discrimination is not necessarily wrong – or, at least, it isn't seen as being necessarily wrong. These can range from the micro level (a woman who will only date men discriminates against other women in her choice of romantic/sexual partners) to the macro (a state that only allows its own nationals to enter without visas discriminates against foreign nationals). They already include the electoral level (the Labour Party is entitled to refuse to select Fine Gael members as candidates). If any of these examples are accepted as not being "wrong", then the blanket assumption that discrimination is wrong is unsustainable – and therefore a statement like "positive discrimination is still discrimination" tells us absolutely nothing about why that is a problem.
She writes,
Those that argue for quotas claim that women don't win selection conventions. Where is the evidence for this? Where the problem really lies is in the fact that not enough women choose to run for election.
I don't have the facts and figures about women winning selection conventions, but I accept that the refusal to run at all is probably a bigger problem. It's odd, though, that she doesn't see the value in having spaces where women can openly discuss the reasons for that refusal. Does she think it will just sort itself out?
I nearly split a gut reading this part:
Quotas treat women as if they can't hack it a party's selection convention, like a man can. They decree that women must be selected on the basis of their gender, and this does them a disservice. Women, just like men, should be chosen on the basis of their qualities as individuals and their ability to persuade voters.
I honestly have to wonder what planet she is on to think that candidates are presently chosen for those reasons. Is that why Maurice "I'm sorry we legalised divorce" Ahern (Bertie's brother) was selected to run in the Dublin Central by-election over the far more capable Mary Fitzpatrick? Is it just a coincidence that when a sitting politician gets a running mate, the candidate selected for that role is often the one who poses the least threat to the incumbent? The pretence that there is a meritocracy at work in the current system is possibly the weakest of all arguments.
The worst thing about Tuffy's column is that it is so poorly argued it suggests that there aren't any valid reasons to oppose quotas, or at least, to question their value. And there are some reasons. Tuffy hints at one when she says
A target is imposed from the top – but the reality on the ground stays the same because the issue is not tackled from the bottom up.
Unfortunately, since she fails to really think this argument through, the reader is left with the suggestion that this alone is a reason to oppose quotas. And it's not. It's an argument not to make quotas the sole "solution" to the issue, but not to exclude them as part of the solution. What she could have pointed out is the danger that quotas could mask the "reality on the ground", could make it look as though there is no longer a problem and hence no need to also tackle the issue from the bottom up. This has in fact been my own experience of quotas: they are essentially a cosmetic solution, and too often they wind up being not a companion to, but instead a substitute for, more substantial measures.
Part of the reason for this, I think, is that quota supporters often have different notions of what the main problem is. Feminists want more women in politics so as to get more pro-woman policies. But in seeking quotas they are allying themselves with people who aren't feminists, don't necessarily support such policies and think that once you've sorted out the male-female imbalance in public life, that is the problem dealt with.
The case for quotas as a means of advancing women's issues is often made by pointing to the Nordic countries, which have high proportions of women in their parliaments and also have very progressive policies around things like parental leave. But that country chart I linked to above shows that things aren't quite as cut and dried as that. There are many countries whose ranking does not appear to coincide with any particular level of commitment to women's rights. Andorra, at number two, still outlaws abortion under any circumstance except risk to life; only this month in Rwanda, the highest-ranked country, three teenage girls received one-year prison sentences for the same "crime". It could well be that things would be even worse for women in those countries if they had less gender-balanced parliaments, but a female majority that won't even remove laws that criminalise reproductive autonomy is hardly a thing worth aspiring to.
The problem with expecting more women in politics to lead to more feminist policies is, of course, that not all women are feminists. Some in fact are the exact opposite – but a quota policy won't discriminate between the two (you see Joanna, that's an example of "positive" discrimination!). Who is to say that the consequences of this policy wouldn't be more Lucinda Creightons? What if men who have actively supported feminist causes were forced out in favour of more conservative female colleagues?
This is one place where my suspicion of quotas differs from Joanna Tuffy's. She writes that
Gender quotas subvert democracy by making the ends more important than the means.
To my mind, equal representation of women in political life is a means and not an end. The "end" will be achieved when equality between men and women (and those outside the binary) is no more of an issue than equality between the blue-eyed and the green-eyed. Gender quotas could be a step towards getting us there, but they're far from an end in themselves. And depending on how they operate in practice, in terms of the candidates who actually benefit from them, there is always the possibility that they could make things worse.
And though I don't like the way quota opponents always resort to whataboutery in these debates, I also don't think we can ignore the shockingly poor representation of ethnic minorities in Irish politics. As far as I can make out, our parliament has two members who are half-Irish and half-something else, one American of apparently Italian descent and everyone else is of an ethnic Irish and/or British background. There are no Travellers, either. The Houses of the Oireachtas must be one of the least diverse employers of its size in the entire country. And local government – where there isn't even a citizenship requirement – is little better. Why isn't this seen as at least as big a scandal as the under-representation of women? If gender quotas are introduced, is there really a good argument as to why ethnic minority quotas shouldn't be next?
Let me be clear – I'm not against quotas, per se. I'm certainly not opposed to them on principle, as Tuffy is. What I question is the enthusiasm that so many Irish feminists have for them. It is especially galling seeing the energy being spent on this campaign by Labour Women, who could be doing much more for gender equality by stopping their party imposing budgetary measures which will have a particularly devastating impact on women. It is hard to take seriously their claims of supporting women's interests by trying to get more women into the exclusive club at Leinster House (starting salary: €100K plus expenses) at a time when their (female) Social Welfare Minister is poised to slash the incomes of the women on the very lowest rungs of society.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is this. Women are oppressed because we live in a capitalist and patriarchal society. It will still be a capitalist and patriarchal society after the quota system is introduced (as appears inevitable). The main difference is that there will be more women administering capitalism and patriarchy. Is that better than fewer women? Sure, if they administer it in a way that does women less harm. But there's no guarantee that they will, and anyway, my feminism is a lot more ambitious than that.
Of course, I don't expect Joanna Tuffy to understand.
Posted in Equality, Politics and tagged Joanna Tuffy, Labour, quotas. Bookmark the permalink.