Irish Jobs Axed - North and South

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Police in Bradford preparing to attack anti-fascists Two days after ten thousand Provisional supporters defied the ban on commemorating the Easter Rising a few thousand Protestant workers demonstrated in Belfast and Larne against the redundancies that will follow proposed cuts in defence spending.

The coalition government in Dublin had neither expectation nor intention of stopping the Provisional's march. Its dramatic gesture in proscribing for the first time a Provisional Sinn Fein commemoration of the rising against the British in 1916 was for the consumption of its power sharing allies in the North.

COMMON

At a time of dramatically rising unemployment both North. and South, the Dublin government were urgently stressing to the Belfast bourgeoisie their common interests and giving a lead in pursuing the authoritarian measures that will be necessary if both are to defend those interests.

The desperate need to stamp upon even the most peaceful expression of Republican sentiment stems from the fact that the Southern economy, entirely dependent upon and totally subservient to foreign investment, is not more than a feather in the face of the cold winds of the present world This is the context in which we should see the recent round up and subsequent torture of 15 members of the IRSP, the Bill of Minister of Justice Cooney to deny prisoners access to their own lawyers as well as a government spokesman's threat to the organisers, stewards, speakers and others directly involved in the organisation of the Easter commemoration that:

...as well as being liable to a fine and three months imprisonment such people would forfeit any government of local authority job and would be disqualified from holding any pension paid for out of public funds"

In 1975 one ers employed in manufacturing industry lost their job - some 7 30D. Figures released at the end at the end March show 115,677 without jobs from a total work force of around one million.

While unemployment grows, inflation continues to rise. The consumer Price Index for the quarter November to February, registered the second biggest increase (at 7.3%) in three years.

Despite this the Confederation of Irish Employers demanded a nine month pay pause from the end of March when the present National Wage Agreement expired.

Into the vacuum created by the absence of a new national agreement stepped 55,000 building workers and 2,300 maintenance craftsmen with a demand for a £15 a week increase.

Such démands, claimed Minister of Finance Ryan "could not possibly be met without Tocketing unemployment, the closure of many industries and the crucifixion of the whole national economy"

None the less, this militant return to independent union bargaining pushed the Irish employers and the bureaucrats of the Executive Council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions towards a new compromise.

PAY PAUSE

They agreed a pay pause of two months instead of nine and in an agreement which is proposed to last for 13½ months there are to be two phased payments of £2 plus 3%. This decisive cut in the Irish working class' living standards is yet to be ratified.

The craft unions have rejected it and stand by their f15 demand. The government, whose Finance Minister Ryan reiterated at an EEC meeting in Strassbourg that any pay increases would be disasterous at the present time, might well also reject it.

Ryan's alarm is very much prompted by the recently released trade figures for March. These show a trading deficit on exports against imports of a staggering £78.1 million. • This is more than double the Liam Cosgrave, Southern Irish Premier £327 deficit for March last year and up again on February's high figure of £50.3 million. This dismal export performance is despite the competitive advantage of a sharply depreciating currency.

The North-East are to have their own version of the Irish Development Agency, the body that has steered the Southern economy into the choppy waters of the world Outlining the purpose of the Northern Ireland Development Agency on All Fools Day in the House of Commons, Stanley Orme revelaed government strategy for securing a reliable restored Stormont.

The powers of the been modified he said, "to bring it into line with the newly created Weish and Scottish agençies and to include it in the overall structure of the National Enterprise Board. It will rescue existing companies in trouble in the North, though mainly it is concerned with general reconstruction....the transformation of an economy and that is what we are talking about cannot be achieved overnight".

Workers, mainly Protestant, This method is now being more and more adopted here by police in black areas like Brixton, and of by Quigley Joe Merlyn demonstrated on April 27th against this "transformation" that.

destroying their jobs. 800 workers at Rolls Royce, 350 at Standard Telephones and Cables, 120 at Regna International in Derry face the sack while 2,000 siklled Ministry of Defence workers are to be phased out by 1978.

Andy • Barr, the Stalinist chairman of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions, recently warned that unemployment could top 80,000 (16% of the work-force) by the end of the year.

That the normally docile Protestant workers are beginning to resist is a significant development. But their 'loyalty' to the British link remains a heavy burden.

"Natural wastage" and voluntary redundancy were supported by the union leaders at Standard Telephone and Cables, believing 'it would at least secure 2,800 jobs from what had been a work force of 4,300.

Now works convenor Joe Bowers says that ITT, the owners of Standard Telephones, intend to reduce the total UK work force at STC from 9,400 to 3,000; a move sciously created as, a section of the armed force to the State. As such it is their task to defend the existing system of capitalist exploitation and private property.

In "normal times" the ruling class maintains its control of the working class through the rightwing leadership of the Labour movement. The police concentrate, meanwhile, in catching 'criminals"

However when workers move beyond the reformist leadership in the fight for jobs and living standards the class nature of the law itself is exposed and the police turn to attacking picket: lines and demonstrations in defence of jobs.

The black community, especially the youth is in a similar position. They are alienated from the organised Labour movement partly as a result of the racialism and hostility to immigrants of the right-wing labour and union bureaucracy and which he fears will wipe out all STC jobs in the North. "STC workers are now wondering" , he said, "on the wisdom of basing the Northern Ireland economy on periphery branches of international conglomerates"

The wondering is yet to be directed at the politicians who led the Protestant working class into their present plight. William Craig and James Kilfedder in Belfast and lan Paisley at Larne were allowed to address the demonstrators.

High Tory Kilfedder caught the mood and declared, "working people must band together and demand security of employment" But not surprisingly, no demands for work sharing, occupation and expropriation were advanced.

NO ATTEMPT In fact no attempt was made to secure a stoppage outside the defence establishments directly hit, though shop stewards from many Belfast factories attended. Instead, they heard nothing more than a plea to Westminister for special treatment and a request that Jim Callaghan come and see for himself.

Stalinist leader Andy Barr had as little to offer Belfast as David Thronley had in Dublin, when he sat mute on the Provisional's Easter platform two days before.

From such labour leaders nothing is to be expected while from a working class that in the North no less than the South refuses to accept peripheral status in multi-national plans, there are. new possibilities.

The defence of jobs, the resistence to flagrant authoritarian rule and colonial exploitation by world imperialism cannot be successful without encroaching upon the rights of private property.

In this sense the permanent character of the Irish revolution can only be realised by fighting around programme that begins with defence of national and democratic rights and living standards, and ends with the recognition of the wisdom of basing a struggle for workers' control on the firm foundation of a rationally planned partly as a result of the fact that they have often never been able to owing tok siracle prejudice of employers and the massive decline in jobs in inner London during the present world capitalist crisis.

The black youth of the big cities is seething with anger against a capitalist system which denies them like thousands of fellow workers a decent job and a wage.

Thus government policy, Labour and Tory, over the last ten years has been to attempt to set up organisations, notably the Community Relations Councils, which while firmly under the control of the Home Office give the illusion of being channels of reform for black people, but which, most important, place power in the hands of a local conservațive middle class black Black youth have rejected these 'Uncle Toms' and their Community Relations Officer friends and turned to militant self-organisation. It is this that police terror tactics are désigned to combat.

We defend all attempts at black self-defence even while recognising their limitations.

But we insist on the need for such defence to call on the organised Labour movement for support and on the class nature of this fight against repression.

A fight for a programme in detence of Jobs,. carried forward against the right-wing in the Labour movement is therefore the requirement. for building the unity of all sections of the working class against capitalism.