The nasty underbelly of the recession has been clearly on view in our neighbours, the UK, since last week. Fuel and power supplies, deemed vital for British industry, are now being disrupted through wildcat strikes over the issue of foreign workers. If one were disposed to be negative, it would be easy to project the UK experience of recent days onto the Irish situation.
At the heart of the unofficial union actions in Britain is a deep unhappiness among the domestic workforce that foreign workers are being hired for key energy installations in a bid by the power companies to get their labour costs down.
Last week about 700 workers downed tools at a Lincolnshire oil refinery, with a further 3,000 walking out in sympathy. The strike actions are now threatening to spread to the nuclear industry with further ballots of workers expected in Sellafield and other sensitive plants.
Peter Mandelson, the British government’s Business Secre-tary, has warned that a move towards more protectionist labour practices “would be a sure-fire way of turning recession into depression”.
Analysts and commentators on this side of the Irish Sea are often too quick to make superficial knee-jerk comparisons between what happens in the UK and here in Ireland, whether it is for good or bad. The bottom line, of course, is that despite a common language and many other cultural similarities, the contrast could not be greater in terms of economic, financial and social matters.
Ireland is clearly linked into the European social model and not the Anglo-American model so vigorously championed by Margaret Thatcher and trenchantly defended by subsequent Prime Ministers, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
For instance, while the UK has opted out of both the euro currency and the controversial European Social Chapter, Ireland has done the opposite. Here, our system of social partnership has pursued and cracked down on both the exploitation of foreign workers but also efforts by certain industry players to undercut local jobs by using low paid foreign workers.
The fact of the matter is that foreign contractors in the UK can undercut local jobs by bringing in foreign European Union workers – not because of Brussels, but rather because successive British governments have pursued a particular social policy regarding workers’ rights.
The minimum wage legislation here in Ireland also acts as a deterrent against what is now occurring in Britain. While both the level of minimum wage and the extent of work-ers’ rights in Ireland is also a source of disquiet in some quarters in Ireland, it has been maintained by the system of consensus and national pay deals.
That is why Brian Cowen is correct to pursue to the end the possibility of keeping this consensus alive, even in the bad economic times. To do otherwise is to visit chaos, industrial unrest and division upon an already fragile economy.
Equally, a consensus on issues to do with immigration and integration is also to be preferred at this time, precisely because introducing social instability into a downward economic spiral becomes a recipe for societal disintegration that other countries have taken years to get out of, if at all.
Conor Lenihan TD is Minister for Integration and represents the constituency of Dublin South West, which includes Tallaght, Greenhills, Firhouse, Templeogue and Boherna-breena
