On Monday, People Before Profit posted something on X that you might otherwise expect from an employer’s group – or perhaps more discreetly as the substance of a PQ from one of those non-Left TDs – you know who you are – who seem to expend considerable time in asking why the already lax criteria for entering the state to work are not further loosened.
PBP declare “We Need Builders”! and proceed to imply that 10,000 people who are seeking asylum but banned from working might be among those builders. This is firstly to ignore the fact that if they wanted to be builders in the first place they could have applied for a work permit after a whole range of construction jobs were added to the expanded list of occupations for which there was a shortage in October 2021.
Secondly, it is further evidence of the schizophrenic belief on the part of the Left (at least while it is not in power, as Sinn Féin’s record on local authorities and in the north which has a 40,000+ housing list is hardly encouraging) that it they would be able to miraculously solve the housing crisis and at the same time continuously expand housing demand through unrestricted immigration.
Which, given as we have previously shown that 90% of our population growth is driven by immigration, is tantamount to having a policy of importing migrant builders to build ever more houses to accommodate immigrants who largely constitute that demand in the first place.
There is another aspect to this, and one that constitutes another blind spot for the myopic Left. This is that inward migration undermines wage levels and working conditions especially for lower paid workers, and diminishes trade union membership and influence. It has ever been thus and is quite logical. Someone coming from a poorer country will naturally be happy to accept these things. Much of the tensions arise from the concerns of communities on the downside of it all.
The Leftist myth that this later leads to worker solidarity and class struggle is nonsense. Such concepts have been pretty much consigned to the history books in so far as strikes are concerned. That is also borne out by the lower and falling rates of union membership and influence across western Europe.
For the Left, the reference point and the most influential lobbies tend to be the advocacy NGOs rather than the unions. That permeates every policy area – as was seen to a huge extent in the debates on the defeated referendum on the family for example, and on the ‘hate crime’ bill – but is particularly strong on issues connected to immigration.
A migrancy or racism NGO or self-appointed monitor of adjacent boldness is far more likely to have its lobby emails cut and pasted and name dropped by a party spokesperson than is the ICTU – even though the ICTU and some individual unions have policies in this area indistinguishable from the NGOs and Left.
That continues to be the case even as it can be argued on strong grounds that mass immigration, either of those legitimately seeking work or economic migrants and others claiming asylum, is increasingly perceived to be detrimental to the material, and indeed social, interests of working people.
Union membership levels have fallen across all of Europe. A document submitted to the Oireachtas in January this year by the ICTU on the minimum wage directive admitted that union membership in Ireland is just 22% across all sectors. It is, in fact, much higher in the public service where workers are better protected in any event by terms of employment.
International data shows that the proportion of union membership in the Republic of Ireland has almost halved since 2000 when it was 38%.
It is much lower among private sector workers and probably tending towards non-existent in some of the sectors in which there is a high proportion of migrant workers. Anyone familiar with Dublin will know that the barmen’s union was very strong at one stage and probably represented the majority of persons working in the trade.
It was able to negotiate and even enforce wage agreements and demands. Apart from the minimum wage requirements bar and hotel owners no longer need to thus engage. The average wage now for a Dublin bar tender is €14.06 per hour. That compares to a minimum entry rate for construction labourers of €14.93. You do not need to be too old to recall when a Dub barman would have been pulling down the shutters if that was the situation.
Of course, the ICTU document nowhere refers to the elephant in the corner when it comes to wage levels and the role of unions in negotiating them. Rather, it wants the state to legislate for sectoral level collective bargaining – oblivious of the fact that it is the changing nature of the workforce itself rather than any legal criteria that have led to the casualisation and indeed undermining of working conditions across many lower paid sectors.
The practical impact of all of this is that there has been a steady long-term decline in the share of the “national wealth” that accrues to labour. This is the case both in Ireland as charted by the CSO, and internationally.
International figures echo the downward trend in union membership. Membership has fallen by 2 million in the United States since 2000, much of it due to increased casualisation and even relocation of former union jobs to Mexico and elsewhere.
In Germany the ratio of union membership to the overall workforce fell from 25% in 2000 to under 17% in 2018. In France, where the unions are still regarded as a powerful force on the Left, union membership is now estimated to be just 8% of the workforce. Other EU states which have experienced large-scale immigration have seen similar declines; in Spain to around 12%, Netherlands 15%, and Greece 19%.
If the political Left has become ideologically committed to mass immigration and paradoxically therefore to the requirements of Capital, on the other side of the political compass the reason that most of the “Old Right” or “Near Right” – or whatever you wish to label those who continue to form the core of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael support – are happy to go along with mass immigration because many of their backers benefit immensely from it.
They do so as employers and landlords primarily, and, just as on the Left, they know it is always better to dress personal interest up as something altruistic and of benefit to everyone. For the Left, in addition, there are strong political motivations rooted in their perhaps naïve belief – if you look at other European states – that they will benefit electorally; and the large state funding for NGOs in which the Left is strong constitute a strong financial interest too.