Almost 80,000 retail, bar and pharmacy workers are set to lose their flat rate expenses on January 1st 2020 so the government can hand a bonanza to highly-paid millionaire executives.

Retail, pharmacy and bar workers are currently entitled to claim between €93-€400 in a flat rate tax relief for costs incurred during their employment. For instance, the purchase, maintenance and cleaning of uniforms, as well as the purchase of tools of the trade, stationary and other essential work items.

Revenue has decided that low paid workers should lose these flat rate expenses while the Irish government appears happy to stand idly by as Mandate Trade Union members lose a valuable benefit they have enjoyed since the 1970s.

For a retail worker, they benefit by a measly €40 per year which barely covers the cost of cleaning their uniforms.

Revenue argue that workers can still make the claim, but that they must have receipts for any expenses. If they’d only be kind enough to suggest how you get a receipt for the electricity used when washing your clothes, or how to quantify the amount of washing powder needed per uniform?

The overall Flat Rate Espenses system was utilised by 600,000 workers in 2017 costing the exchequer €48m in total — or an average cost to the state of €80 per worker. We would argue this is hardly worth taking off low paid workers.

But then, perhaps revenue has decided others are more deserving?

SARP

In the 2020 Budget the Irish government announced the extension of the Special Assignee Relief Programme (SARP) scheme which gives tax relief of 30% on income over €75,000 to executives from foreign owned companies who are re-located to Ireland.

Revenue figures showed 18 people earning between €1 million and €10 million a year had benefitted from the scheme in 2016, with four of those people on salaries in excess of €3 million.

A detailed breakdown of costs involved showed how a person on €3 million a year would pay €351,000 less in tax under the scheme while someone on €9 million would get a €1.07 million write-off.

Part of the scheme also allows for tax relief on private school fees of up to €5,000 per child.

According to records, €600,000 worth of private tuition had been claimed for in 2016, the last year for which figures are available.

Meanwhile, the salaries of the teachers in those private schools are paid by you, the taxpayers.

SARP will be extended for another two years with it costing the exchequer €28.1m in tax foregone in 2017 and benefitting only 1,084 employees.

Think about that:
— the SARP scheme cost an average €26,000 for the 1,084 workers who availed of it; while
— the Flat Rate Expense system cost an average of €80 for the 600,000 workers who availed of it.

Can you see who the State prioritises?

KEEP

Then there’s the Key Employee Engagement Programme (KEEP).
KEEP is an incentive brought in by the Irish government in 2017 that allows companies to pay executives up to €300,000 in shares which they do not have to pay income taxes on (PAYE, USC or PRSI).

The employee makes savings by only paying tax at the lower Capital Gains Tax rate of 33% when disposing of those shares, instead of the marginal income tax rate of 52% (PAYE, USC and PRSI combined). It was estimated in the last two Budgets that this would cost €10m per year.

So, join the dots. Highly paid executives are being awarded tax reliefs worth €40m per year while revenue is cutting Flat Rate Expenses from low paid workers saving €48m.

We have four by-elections coming up in Cork, Wexford and two in Dublin. It would do no harm to let politicians know what you think of these policies.

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What are flat rate expenses?

Approximately 50 years ago trade unions negotiated for workers to be able to write off expenses accrued due to their employment for taxation purposes. This relief is for the purchase and maintenance of uniforms, tools and stationary, for instance. However, the flat rate means all workers in an employment category collect the same amount irrespective of how much expense they accrue.

How does it work?

The tax relief must be claimed by the worker because it is not automatically applied by Revenue. However, after you make your first claim, Revenue should have applied it every year thereafter.

The way it operates is quite simple. The relief allocated to your specific employment reduces your taxable income. For instance, if you are a retail worker and you earn €20,000 per year, your taxable income is reduced by €121 bringing it to €19,879.

What are the allowances?

The allowances vary based on the role you are employed in. A full list of the 53 employment categories with 134 individual flat rate expenses is available by clicking here. However, the industries appropriate to Mandate membership include:

• Pharmacists — €400
• Pharmaceutical Assistants (formerly known as Assistant Pharmacists) — €200
• Shop Assistants (including supermarket staff, general shop workers, drapery and footwear assistants) — €121
• Bar trade: employees — €93

How do I claim my allowance?

Under Revenue rules you are entitled to claim for the previous four years (2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018). The quickest and easiest way to claim Flat Rate Expenses is through PAYEAnytime, which is available online via Revenue’s MyAccount facility.

When trade unions originated back in the mid-1800s they were considered, and even referred to in law, as criminal conspiracies. Employers at the time were openly hostile to sharing profits with their workers. The advent of trade unions eventually gave some power to workers and weakened the position of the employers, but they were not defeated; and it was only through many years of struggle by organised workers that gains were eventually made.

Times and terminology may have changed, but relations between employers and employees have not. Employers’ sole purpose is to maximise the profit from employees’ labour.

Employers have learnt over time how to achieve this less controversially, but the results are the same. Today, inequality is at a record level, with no end in sight. According to the Central Bank, the richest 10 per cent of Irish-resident financial asset-holders (those with shares, financial investments, or deposits) now have €50 billion more than at the peak in 2006. So “austerity” worked very well for them.

At the same time as this growing inequality and erosion of working conditions, union density is at its lowest. And these two facts are related.

Little by little, the rules of engagement were changed. The carrot-and-stick approach was used to lull workers into a false sense of security. They are allowed to join unions—but employers don’t have to recognise them. “Social partnership” was agreed between unions, the state, and employers’ organisations. National pay agreements were entered into. This led to an end to negotiations on a company-by-company basis. This in turn led to less industrial action and fewer strikes.

The jewel in the crown was the Industrial Relations Act (1990), which took large areas of control and decision-making away from unions and their members and left them in the hands of employers and the courts. It also banned many of the tactics used by unions to achieve the gains won in the past, such as secondary picketing, support strikes, sit-ins, political strikes, and a plethora of other methods that had been successfully used in struggle.

The velvet war against union power was complete. Unions were no longer in the front line of struggle but had morphed into a support service for workers. This weakened the unions as they became involved in cosy national negotiations. They took their eye off the ball as, bit by bit, working conditions were eroded, inequality skyrocketed, and precarious employment replaced the permanent, pensionable jobs that had been secured through years of sustained union struggle.

With short-term contracts, minimum-hours contracts, bogus self-employment, and the “gig economy,” conditions have come full circle. Employers have brought working conditions for the majority of those now entering the work force right back to where they were when workers began to organise 150 years ago. The present generation of workers have no experience of radical union struggle and its victories.

It’s time for the trade union movement to go back to basics. We need to fight precarious working conditions, as our predecessors did. These battles will not be won in the board room but on the shop floor.

For workers to tip the balance of power away from employers, the 1990 act has to be abolished so as to give workers power over when and where they take action.

But there is nothing like poverty wages and poor working conditions to radicalise workers. History has a habit of repeating itself, and we must learn from it. Four unions have passed motions at their delegate conference calling for the 1990 act to be abolished: Mandate, Connect, Fórsa, and Unite.

The narrative has developed that the right to union access, union recognition and full collective bargaining will solve all our problems. These rights are certainly necessary for workers to tip the balance of power in their favour. We also need weapons to fight with, and that weapon is the right to strike, when and where workers choose to—not at a time that best suits employers.

Profit is the goal of employers. If unions have the power to hit their pockets by not allowing them to prepare in advance through excessive notice periods and endless court injunctions, they will have to take notice of demands. The threat alone will force them to take notice.

Working conditions are not the only thing that is destroying the lives of working people. The crisis in housing and in the health service and the slashing of all state services have pushed living standards back to levels not seen for fifty years. Back in the 1970s unions successfully called workers out onto the streets to demand tax reform. That was when union density was high, before the 1990 act, when unions could strike for political reasons and had the confidence to do so.

Unions need to lead from the front: to be seen to be confident, strong, and willing to fight for their members, and not only on pay but on all aspects of workers’ lives. We cannot do this unless we have the power to do so. Union recognition on its own is useless if our hands are tied behind our backs by legislation.

Politicians have abandoned ordinary working people. It’s up to the trade union movement to fight for decency in workers’ lives, along with better pay and conditions, to end the crisis in housing and the health service, to bring an end to precarious employment. Then, once again, workers will be proud to wear their union badge, as they were when Larkin and Connolly instilled pride, hope and confidence in the working class.

An extra 1 per cent in a pay deal helps workers. Abolishing the Industrial Relations Act will empower them.

Unions will have to become radical or become redundant.

From The People’s World website

Victor Grossman is the author of A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee. He defected from the U.S. Army in 1952 to escape the Cold War repression of the Red Scare. He lived in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) from then until the country went out of existence in 1990. He continues to live in Germany today and authored this commentary on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

BERLIN—Media jubilation reached a climax here on Nov. 9th, thirty years after the bumbling, perhaps even misunderstood decision to open the gate for all East Germans to stream through, hasten to the nearest West Berlin bank for their “welcome present” of 100 prized West German marks, and taste the joys of the western free market system.

Within less than a year, they would end the experiment known as the German Democratic Republic to join and fully enjoy, the wealthy, healthy, prosperous united Germany, with its freedom of the press, speech, travel, and consumer bliss.

The jubilation of thirty years ago is easy to understand and to sympathize with. The ability, whenever and as often as desired, to meet and celebrate with friends and relatives sufficed to bring tears to many, many eyes and the almost universal cries of “Wahnsinn!”—“Simply crazy!”

But moving as those scenes were, and happy to so many in their recollections, a history-based, sterner evaluation awakens doubts that, despite the paeans in the world media, this was not purely a peaceful  revolution, a choice of freedom by the masses, another successful victory for freedom and justice as in past centuries. We recall that revolutions are complex, that the American Revolution was followed by Shay’s Rebellion, a bolstering of slavery, and a bloody six-year war which forced most Indians from Ohio. The short era of Robespierre meant almost a year in prison for Tom Paine. And enthusiastic crowds can also make very false judgments.

East Germans soon learned that freedom of the press was for those who owned the presses, that freedom of speech helped most those who ruled over studios and cable connections. Most tellingly, they learned very quickly that those 100 West-marks were soon spent and new ones, for all those glistening commodities and travels, had somehow to be earned, while over 95% of the industry they had built up was taken over by Westerners and, robbed of any machinery of value, for the most part, shut down. It was now very simple to move westwards; several million did, now not for freedom, consumer goods, or better-paid jobs but for any job at all.

Professors, teachers, scientists, journalists, and administrators at every level were thrown out, replaced by second- and third-string West Germans who were certain they could do everything better—and got “bush bonuses“ for making the sacrifice of taking over East Germany. For workers, the wage level today is still below that in the West, while jobless figures and the length of the workweek for those now finding a job are both above the figures in the West.

The victory thirty years ago brought other changes. The old GDR had, until the end, no drug problem, almost no AIDS, no organized crime, no school shootings, none of the free food banks now so prevalent, since people in the GDR, while lacking food items like oranges, bananas, and other southern imports, all had enough to eat. Nor was there anyone in those years begging or sleeping in the streets, since there were always jobs a-plenty and evictions were illegal. So was any discrimination against women, who got equal pay, at least a half-year paid maternal leave, free abortions, cheap summer vacations and summer camps, and one paid day off a month for household duties.

Oh yes, there were blunders a-plenty—stupidity, careerism, dogmatism. Envy and greed could not be eradicated from the human soul, but with almost no feverish competition, they were lessened, as the polls found. True, where people gained positions of power they were as capable of misusing it as elsewhere. Nor could all the remnants of fascist poison be erased from 16 million heads in one or two generations. But they were forbidden, and those with racist thoughts and prejudices kept them to themselves or within their closest circles, while truly masterful films, books, and plays endeavored to combat them. Today, Nazi thugs march every weekend, and the pro-fascist Alternative for Germany party has 94 seats in the Bundestag and won second place in three state elections.

Here we hit on the main problem with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall. The GDR had thrown out—lock, stock, and barrel—all the giant cartels and monopolies which profited from World War I, built up Hitler when, during the Depression, working people became rebellious, then earned billions from slave labor during World War II, and, after 1945, regained immense wealth and power.

In the West, Bayer and BASF, major perpetrators of Auschwitz, are on top of the chemical pile, worldwide now with Monsanto. Powerful old fascist fat cats like Daimler (Mercedes) and Quandt (BMW) are cheating the environmentalists, Rheinmetall and Heckler & Co. are again making billions with their tanks and guns and missiles. All their properties were confiscated by the GDR—which is why they hated it and conspired against it, successfully. Also because the GDR, as opposed to its rival in Bonn (capital of West Germany), supported the Algerians in their fight for freedom, Allende against Pinochet, Mandela and the ANC and SWAPO in Africa, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and freedom fighters everywhere from Nicaragua to Aden.

The very existence of the GDR represented a barrier against further expansion by the Bayers with their control of ever more seed sources and their destruction of natural life, from frogs and butterflies to orchids, cacti and rain forests, but also against weapons makers who desire nothing more than further world tension, especially with Russia and China, the two main remaining barriers to world hegemony of the billionaires.

After 1945 and until 1990, no uniformed Germans were shooting presumed enemies anywhere in the world. With the GDR out of the way, the Bundeswehr, Germany’s army, flew missions and dropped bombs in the mountains of Afghanistan and trained soldiers in the desert sands of Mali—after beginning by bombing Serbia, repeating Germany’s crimes in two world wars.

United Germany’s Minister of Defense, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who hopes to become chancellor, has demanded that Germany play a far bigger role in today’s world and plans a big build-up of weapons to achieve this. She has found smiling support from Secretary of State Pompeo, who came to Berlin and joined in the hallelujahs for the victory of democracy thirty years earlier. Yes, Pompeo!

The GDR had countless faults and limitations, caused by poor leadership—mostly aged anti-fascist fighters, trying to save the endeavor to achieve socialism in at least this small corner of Germany, but overtaken by modern developments and never able to find rapport with large sections of a vacillating population tempted by daily TV images of a wonderful world in the Golden West, which had been built up to become one of the world’s richest countries.

The GDR was battered by a world of problems from all sides, domestic and foreign, pressured into “arming itself to the death” militarily, limited by the giant costs of the new electronic, computer age, with no help from the east and a boycott by the west, plus its giant humanitarian project—supplying good, modern homes for everyone while keeping rents to about one-tenth of income.

In the end, the odds were against it. But just as a World Series victory by the Washington Nationals did not mean that team was morally better but simply that at the time it was stronger, the defeat of the GDR did not mean that the system it was trying to develop, strengthen, and improve—socialism—was proven false by its defeat.

The opening of the Berlin War was seen then and is still regarded by many as a wonderful victory. Looking around today’s deteriorating situation in Germany and much of Europe, with fascist movements on the rise and world-destroying weapons deployed and maneuvering dangerously, one might well recall the words of the Greek general Pyrrhus. After beating the Romans in the Battle of Asculum in 279 BCE, but with terrible losses for his own troops, he is quoted as saying: “Another such victory and we are lost!”

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CONTRIBUTOR

Victor Grossman 

 

Victor Grossman is a journalist from the U.S. now living in Berlin. He fled in the 1950s in danger of reprisals for his left-wing activities at Harvard and in Buffalo, New York. He landed in the former German Democratic Republic (Socialist East Germany), studied journalism, founded a Paul Robeson Archive and became a freelance journalist and author. His books available in English: Crossing the River. A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany. His latest book,  A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee, is about his life in the German Democratic Republic from 1949 – 1990, tremendous improvements for the people under socialism, reasons for the fall of socialism, and importance of today’s struggles.

This ongoing and vitally important campaign came about as a result of an increase in complaints from retail workers regarding the amounts of both verbal and physical abuse from customers. Mandate conducted an extensive survey involving over 20 retail businesses and their employees

This campaign is undoubtedly Mandate’s most significant campaign in several years and has a number of objectives including raising awareness of this issue and trying to influence change from a small number of people who tend to abuse retail workers as well as securing stronger health and safety protections in the workplace for vulnerable workers in Irish retail.

The booklet “Voices in Retail” outlines the aims and objectives of the Respect Retail Workers Campaign in more detail and also details harrowing real life experiences of ordinary retail workers from the front line as well as providing an insight into the worrying statistical survey results and can be accessed via the link below.

If you wish to become involved in the Respect Retail Workers Campaign in your local area do not hesitate to contact your local shop steward or alternatively respect@mandate.ie

November 10th: Unite, which represents English Language Teachers throughout Ireland, today (Sunday) announced that pickets will resume tomorrow at Delfin English School while members in IBAT have also voted to take industrial action and will be holding a series of one-hour stoppages starting tomorrow with the potential for escalation if issues in dispute are not resolved.

Teachers at Delfin will be taking strike action from  November 11^th to November 15^th inclusive, and from December 2^nd to December  6^th inclusive.  Teachers at IBAT will be holding one-hour stoppages (morning and afternoon) tomorrow and Friday, as well as on November 18^th, 22^nd, 25^th and 29^th.

Commenting, Unite Regional Officer Brendan Byrne said:

“The international education sector, of which ELT is a large part, is booming, with the government projecting that the value of the sector will grow to over €2 billion by next year.  Committed, experienced and highly-skilled teachers are central to that success, yet they are often low-paid and often employed on precarious contracts.

“Rather than talking collectively to teachers about their concerns through the union of their choice, school management often rely on a culture of intimidation to squeeze pay and conditions while maximising their profits.

“Based on the feedback from our members, Unite believes that unrest in the sector will continue to spread unless and until there is a negotiated collective agreement.  We are hopeful that the Labour Court will recommend such an agreement in the near future”, Mr Byrne said.

Coca-Cola workers in Haiti, Indonesia, Ireland, and the USA still need your support

Coca-Cola continues to violate the fundamental rights of workers in Haiti, Indonesia, Ireland and the USA.

In Haiti its bottler La Brasserie de la Couronne continues to systematically deny workers their right to form and be represented by a union, SYTBRACOUR (read more here).

In Indonesia Coca-Cola bottler Amatil pursues its long running attack on the rights of independent, democratic trade unions (for more read here).

In Ireland, The Coca-Cola Company closed two of its directly owned concentrate plants, both of which were strongly unionized, and shifted production to the remaining plant in Ballina, where it refuses to engage in collective bargaining with the IUF-affiliated SIPTU.

In the USA the Company’s bottler spent more than 330,000.00 US dollars hiring a union-busting consultant firm to persuade workers at its Greenfield bottling plant to not join the RWDSU/UFCW.

Please show your support for these workers and the fight for rights in the Coca-Cola system. USE THE FORM BELOW TO SEND A MESSAGE to The Coca-Cola Company’s CEO and Chairman James Quincey, expressing your outrage over these ongoing human rights violations and demanding the Company act to remedy them. Your name will also be added to a petition that will be delivered to The Coca-Cola Company.

Date Released: 07 November 2019

SIPTU representatives have stated that they will oppose any attempt to enforce compulsory redundancies on staff in RTÉ following the emergence of a plan to impose 200 job cuts at the national broadcaster.

SIPTU Services Division Organiser, Karan O Loughlin, said: “SIPTU will oppose any attempt to enforce compulsory redundancies on staff in RTE. A plan for cutbacks at the national broadcaster, which was disgracefully leaked to the media yesterday (Wednesday, 6th November), reveals plans to cut 200 jobs.

“The plan envisages that these job cuts will be achieved on a voluntary basis. However, there have already been several rounds of voluntary redundancies at the station, the last one of which was not fully subscribed. It is unclear to our members how 200 voluntary redundancies can be achieved.

“These workers have been through several rounds of rationalisation at the station. They have taken the pain to assist in ensuring the survival of the crucial services which are provided by RTÉ and the thanks they have received is to be faced with an ultimatum concerning job cuts.”

She added: “What has made this situation even worse is the way this plan was exposed. Only senior management at RTÉ had access to this plan yet it was leaked to the media. This was extremely disrespectful to the loyal staff at the station.

“How and why this leak occurred is a matter that RTÉ Director General Dee Forbes must investigate and action must be taken against the culprit to deal with this extreme breach of trust.”

SIPTU and its affiliate unions, Equity Ireland and the Musicians Union of Ireland, represent approximately 1,200 RTÉ staff members.

The power of workers in society has been declining consistently since the 1970s. Power, measured by various metrics, such as union membership, union density, and days of industrial action, has been on a steady decline, related to and proportionate to the increased wealth of the rich and the transformation of Ireland into a haven for foreign direct investment and, more recently, a tax haven.

As workers have less power in society, ideology and politics have shifted significantly to the right. Governments have implemented policy after policy that has left Ireland deeply divided and unequal. Liberal moves in recent times should not mask what is an extremely right-wing political establishment and ideology that is accepted within many parties.

In this situation, to many workers the trade union movement is irrelevant. For years, through “partnership,” it was seen as—and actually was—a partner to the Government that didn’t deliver for workers. Now when it tries to engage on broader social or political issues it is often met with confusion or indifference, sometimes even hostility, from within its own ranks. Yet where unions engage and organise in work-places and on work-place issues we see many examples of workers joining, becoming involved and altering the balance of power in their work-place, for example for better pay, hours, or contracts.

Trade union membership has been steadily declining for decades, somewhat masked for a while by the property boom. It’s fair to say that it faces a threat to its very existence. The decline may have slowed recently, thanks to the hard work of organisers and worker activists in some unions and industries; but the movement is essentially in a slow and steady decline.

Union mergers, while sometimes logical, rarely if ever alter this decline. The merged union often becomes little more than one big declining union and often ends up more distant from workers and work-places, more bureaucratic, and prone to bitter internal rows.

This is the challenge we face, and we should face it head on. The solution in fact is amazingly simple—because we know what works. When union activists, organisers and officials engage with workers, listen to the issues in their work-places, and together agree a way forward based on talking to the workers, then we both grow the union and alter the balance of power in the work-place.

Listen and talk to workers. Organise workers in work-places. It won’t always work perfectly well; you won’t always get the same results in different work-places. There are power structures beyond our control or influence; but we can control what we do and what we give priority to.

So, what will empower workers and save the movement? Organise in work-places. And, complementary to this, we should campaign to change the conditions under which we organise and act as unions. A Fair Work Act covering such things as right to access, collective bargaining and better strike laws would make work-place organising more successful.

Taken together, this strategy would alter the balance of power in society back more towards workers and away from the rich and the establishment. This would change the political discourse and provide a material basis for these faint cries for “left unity” and for the failed efforts previously made by unions.

But it must be this way round, otherwise it is doomed to failure and another big mistake. To attempt to build some kind of political unity on disjointed and disconnected political entities or individuals is as likely to fail as the union merger strategy, as it doesn’t sit on top of any material foundations. We urgently need to build the foundations through organising workers and changing the rules on which we act.

The politics will follow then in a much stronger, more real and organic way.