Good luck to Mandate and Dunnes workers

  TULF wish Mandate and Dunnes workers the very best in the Labour Court next week. Mandate Assistant General Secretary Gerry Light told us today,   ‘We are going before the Labour Court next week with a very important case for Dunnes workers and for workers generally. The issues we are bringing forward under the recent Industrial Relations (Amendment Act) 2015 are around hours of work and contracts. These workers should be entitled to decent secure hours of work so they can plan and budget their lives. The uncertainty they exist with is simply unfair in a so called modern […]

New Briefing Document: Public Enterprise versus Private Inefficiency

The Trade Union Left Forum has put this brief guide, available at https://www.tuleftforum.com/discussion-papers/, for union activists to use in combating commonly used arguments in favour of privatisation and against public ownership. There is mounting evidence of the value of public-sector investment, compared with the inefficiency and waste of private-led investment; yet this is silenced by the privately owned media, just as they call into question the right of communities to peacefully resist the imposition of water charges. We have all had arguments with a friend or colleague where the claim of the efficiency of the market is made, that competition is […]

Legal attack on SIPTU is a warning to unions

Recently, various stories have appeared in the capitalist media about pay increases, hinting that IBEC and SIPTU want to return to some form of “social partnership,” purely on the pay issue. (None of the woolly stuff about social issues.) At the same time, capitalist shock-troops are using different negotiating tactics: force and intimidation. On the one hand, employers’ organisations have been leaking stories about pay increases; however, they want the “pay increases” to come from a reduction in tax. In other words, everyone finances pay increases for employers, so they increase their profits, and there is a further reduction in […]