March 16, 2024
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Throughout 2023 and into 2024, the North of Ireland [1] has witnessed the largest and most sustained public sector strikes in all of its jaundiced, gerrymandered 100-year history.
The strikes are about pay for public sector workers. For several years now, public sector pay in the North has not kept pace with inflation. Real pay, adjusted for inflation, fell by 4% between 2021 and 2022, and fell a further 7% between 2022 and 2023. Public sector workers finally reached breaking point and decided their only recourse was to strike.
The most significant day of action took place on 18th January when 16 public sector unions decided to go on a 24-hour strike to demand pay increases. Around 150,000 public sector workers went on strike that day. That’s a whopping 66% of all public sector workers in the North, and included nurses, doctors and other health and social care workers; teachers; further education lecturers; cleaners; refuse collectors; police; public transport workers; civil servants; and forestry and road service workers. Schools were shut and buses and trains were canceled. A skeleton health service operated with scheduled appointments postponed and emergency-only cases treated. Icy roads went ungritted, courts and tribunals offered limited services. The level of solidarity on 18th January among public sector unions and workers was unparalleled. Many of these workers were striking for the first time ever in their careers; many of these professions such as junior doctors were striking for the first time ever in their existence in the North. And though many didn’t want to strike, they felt they’d been left with no choice.
Political backdrop
While these strikes have been going on, a bit of political theatre has been playing. The North is governed by Stormont, an administration devolved from the British parliament in Westminster. Stormont has no fiscal or any other decision-making powers of any importance. It can raise very limited revenue and depends predominately on a block grant from Westminster for pretty much all of its public funding. Stormont went into suspension in February 2022. I won’t bore you with the details of why other than to say that the Democratic Unionist Party, a conservative and British party, threw their dummy out of the pram because they didn’t like how the Brexit trade protocol was shaping up. The power-sharing feature of Stormont meant that their withdrawal brought the administration down.
No amount of cajoling or seducing on the part of the Tory government in Westminster could coax them to return to Stormont. So, the Tories did what the Tories do best: they fought dirty. They decided to use public sector pay as a political bargaining chip, or more accurately as a form of blackmail, by claiming they were powerless to increase pay and that only Stormont could make such a decision. That, of course, is one huge pile of horse manure and even the dogs on the street know it. All the money in Stormont comes from Westminster. With the stroke of a pen, the Tories could’ve increased wages. But they stubbornly refused any such move. Instead, they offered £600m for the wage increases as part of a bigger financial package, if and only if Stormont was restored. The legalities of such action, that of denying workers their rights in order to play political games, are dubious to say the least.
Again, I won’t bore you with the tedious details of how the DUP eventually capitulated but suffice to say that the Stormont Assembly resumed in February 2024.
Despite that, there is yet no resolution to the public sector pay problem. Since coming into post, the new finance minister has offered pay deals to civil servants and health staff and to public transport workers. The new education minister has made an offer to teachers. The transport workers have rejected the offer and will continue to strike. The civil servants and health staff are still considering their offer, as are the teachers.
Social costs
The strikes have strong support from the public. Most people recognise why the workers are striking, they see it as only right that these workers get fair pay, and they accept that the workers don’t want to strike but see no other way. The strikes are causing disruption to public services and to the local economy. The media of course have focused less on the plight of the workers and more on the negative impacts, such as the suspension of cancer treatment during the strikes and the impact on trade for the retail and hospitality sectors. Certainly, the negatives are real. I, myself, talked to an employee in the hospitality sector who said she supported the strikers but with there being no buses it meant she struggled to get to work, and either had to pay for taxis or miss her shifts altogether. The fact is the whole point of striking is to create disruption and to raise the social costs. The irony is that it’s the most vulnerable in society or just average people who feel those costs most, and that can create animosity instead of solidarity, especially the longer the strikes go on.
I can’t help thinking about Yemen’s Ansarallah and their current blockade of maritime traffic connected to Israel that is traveling through the Red Sea. While the ideal would be the existence of no such campaign, of no genocide in Gaza, of no war anywhere, we are far from the ideal and Ansarallah are operating within the sad realities of our corrupted world. The Ansarallah goal is to force Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. Their blockade targets Israeli economic interests, not human life; the blockade goes after ships associated with Israel, no other ships; the blockade doesn’t sink or seize ships, but diverts them from their course. Ansarallah’s blockade is about raising the social costs to those in power, hitting them where it hurts most. And while they haven’t yet achieved their goal of ending the genocide, they’re certainly causing damage to the Israeli economy, costing it billions of dollars and disrupting supply chains.
I wonder if we can learn from Ansarallah and pinpoint ways of raising the social costs to those with power as we travel the road of radical change. It’s a thought and I’m not advocating that we buy helicopters and start commandeering ships. I’m using the Ansarallah campaign as an example of an intelligent and efficient use of resources to achieve an end goal.
But back to the North of Ireland and to the strikes here. What action can be taken by those seeking social change to minimises the social costs to the average person who’s just trying to make a living, while maximising the social costs to those who have the power to implement the change sought? And now that there are hundreds of thousands of people here energised and taking action, what can be done to maximise and prolong the potential of that activism?
Solidarity, vision and strategy
To my mind, this is where solidarity, vision and strategy enter the fray. Widespread solidarity and overarching vision and strategy are often missing from this kind of brave activism. Yet greater solidarity and greater unity in a common vision and strategy would go a long way to resolving the problem of who suffers most from raising the social costs.
Let’s first look at solidarity. The public sector workers in the North have essentially formed a powerful workers’ movement. The North already has several movements, some large and vibrant, others more muted and embryonic. There’s the grassroots movement to promote and protect the Irish language, An Dream Dearg (Red Dream). In the summer of 2022, they held a rally in Belfast that was attended by nearly 17,000 people who filled the streets around City Hall. There’s also a large pro-Palestinian / anti-war movement. This has become increasingly active since October 2023 and Israel’s most recent onslaught on Palestine, and people have been turning out in their thousands, week after week, to protest. There’s a Black Lives Matter movement here, brought into existence in 2020 following the callous murder of George Floyd. The Pride movement has also grown in popularity over recent years and energetic, carnival-style rallies take place every summer in major urban areas across the North.
These movements have members in common. An Dream Dearg have declared support for Palestine. Several of the trade unions involved in the public sector strikes openly support Palestine. Their members and leaders have joined the pro-Palestinian protests and spoken out against the genocide. There’s even a Trade Union Friends of Palestine group. Many of those involved in the pro-Palestinian / anti-war movement are also involved in the public sector strikes and An Dream Dearg. It’s stating the obvious that public sector workers can be gay, black, support Palestine or want to protect the Irish language. And on and on go the many permutations of interrelationships between them all.
What they have in common is their desire for social change of one sort or another, although some struggle to get enough support to achieve the social change they want. They could reach greater success if they were in solidarity with the other movements. In fact, they would all benefit by having the support of each other. The other movements could, right now, join the public sector workers and support them in their efforts to win pay increases. Such solidarity would bolster the striking workers but would also send a loud message to politicians and decision-makers that better pay for public sectors workers is important to more than just the workers, it’s important to wider society too.
It’s worth considering what happens when a movement makes progress towards achieving its goals. If, for instance, the striking public sector workers win their pay increases, will they disband? Say the teachers take a pay deal but the health workers don’t – will the teachers abandon the strikes and go meekly back into their trenches, leaving the others to continue alone? If they all take pay deals and end their strikes, where will that energy and momentum go? Will it disappear like smoke on the wind?
Which brings us to vision and strategy. Given the commonalities among these movements, would there be any possibility they could unite to create and then work towards a common vision and strategy? Could the energy and momentum be harnessed and prolonged to achieve not just a one-off reform but multiple non-reformist reforms? The public sector workers are striking for a single demand to meet their own needs. But what if that demand was one goal within a broader strategy to achieve a widely accepted vision for radical transformation?
What if the striking workers didn’t stop at achieving their pay rise? Because wages across society are way short of equitable, what if the strikes were seen as just one tactic along the way for fairer wages? What if instead the public sector workers continued campaigning, this time for a living wage for all workers in the North, where we understand a living wage to be a fair wage that increases based on the cost of living. What if they were joined by the other movements in doing so? And joined too by the hundreds of thousands of non-public sector workers living on poverty wages, who are denied wage increases, who were hardest hit by the bus and train strikes?
What if, in continuing this sustained and augmented strike action, all of these movements took measures to minimise the social costs to the regular people who are normally hit hardest by strikes? So, a strike by health workers would keep enough staff in place to treat emergency cases and provide critical care (I should point out that during the current strikes, health workers did take such measures). A strike by teachers would provide alternative day care for the children of those who stand to lose income if they miss work because of a strike. A public transport strike would offer a skeleton service to get people to and from work. Since all of these movements are united, a mega-strike could be organised to occur simultaneously across sectors so everybody is on strike rather than having to be at their place of work.
Putting such mitigating measures in place is certainly a challenge and they’re rare applied. But going the extra mile to reduce the social costs to the people you don’t want to hurt would serve to create greater solidarity. And having a movement of movements in itself would give strikers access to additional resources which in turn would make implementing the mitigating measure more plausible.
While all of that holds true, there’s more at stake than a battle for wages. What if this movement of movements in the North decided that wages were merely the beginning and that once better wages were won, the next step was to achieve better working conditions such as secure jobs, a 4-day work week, subsidised childcare, participatory workplaces, or worker ownership altogether?
What if the united vision and strategy didn’t limit itself to workers’ pay and conditions? What if it was expanded to reach so much more? What if it included participatory budgeting where the people would have a say in how public budgets were to be spent; a universal basic income; meaningful rights and equality for minority groups; mutual banking to retain local wealth and use it for the benefit of people and planet rather than the benefit of the global finance system; tax justice and progressive taxation; social and co-operative housing; a properly funded health service and education system; community- and publically-owned renewable energy to create energy independence and move away from fossil fuels; sustainable farming and food production; a demand for fiscal control or even better, independence from Britain and a return to the EU; the implementation of a local Green New Deal and a genuine and just transition to a post-capitalist society? What if the post-capitalist society in this united vision and strategy was to be a participatory society, free from racism, sexism, patriarchy, classism and authoritarianism and where there would be an alternative to the inadequate democratic system and existing family and cultural institutions? And what if this united vision and strategy was joined with international movements, forging alliances that could bring about radical transformation beyond Ireland?
What if indeed?
END NOTE
[1] Ireland was an English/British colony for over 800 years before it won partial independence in 1921, at which time it was partitioned into two jurisdictions: 1) the North or “Northern Ireland”, made up of 6 counties with a majority Protestant population that remained under British rule (and remains so today); and 2) the South or “Republic of Ireland”, made up of 26 counties and with a majority Catholic population that gained freedom from Britain. The North is governed by the British government at Westminster and has a devolved administration called Stormont. The 6 counties of the North were cherry-picked to ensure it would have a majority pro-British population, i.e. majority Protestant. Through gerrymandering and other policies e.g. denying civil rights to the largely Catholic Irish-identifying population, forcing them to emigrate for work, the North maintained its Protestant hegemony. That has changed in recent years, however, and today the Catholic and Protestant populations are almost equal in size.
Throughout 2023 and into 2024, the North of Ireland [1] has witnessed the largest and most sustained public sector strikes in all of its jaundiced, gerrymandered 100-year history.
The strikes are about pay for public sector workers. For several years now, public sector pay in the North has not kept pace with inflation. Real pay, adjusted for inflation, fell by 4% between 2021 and 2022, and fell a further 7% between 2022 and 2023. Public sector workers finally reached breaking point and decided their only recourse was to strike.
The most significant day of action took place on 18th January when 16 public sector unions decided to go on a 24-hour strike to demand pay increases. Around 150,000 public sector workers went on strike that day. That’s a whopping 66% of all public sector workers in the North, and included nurses, doctors and other health and social care workers; teachers; further education lecturers; cleaners; refuse collectors; police; public transport workers; civil servants; and forestry and road service workers. Schools were shut and buses and trains were canceled. A skeleton health service operated with scheduled appointments postponed and emergency-only cases treated. Icy roads went ungritted, courts and tribunals offered limited services. The level of solidarity on 18th January among public sector unions and workers was unparalleled. Many of these workers were striking for the first time ever in their careers; many of these professions such as junior doctors were striking for the first time ever in their existence in the North. And though many didn’t want to strike, they felt they’d been left with no choice.
Political backdrop
While these strikes have been going on, a bit of political theatre has been playing. The North is governed by Stormont, an administration devolved from the British parliament in Westminster. Stormont has no fiscal or any other decision-making powers of any importance. It can raise very limited revenue and depends predominately on a block grant from Westminster for pretty much all of its public funding. Stormont went into suspension in February 2022. I won’t bore you with the details of why other than to say that the Democratic Unionist Party, a conservative and British party, threw their dummy out of the pram because they didn’t like how the Brexit trade protocol was shaping up. The power-sharing feature of Stormont meant that their withdrawal brought the administration down.
No amount of cajoling or seducing on the part of the Tory government in Westminster could coax them to return to Stormont. So, the Tories did what the Tories do best: they fought dirty. They decided to use public sector pay as a political bargaining chip, or more accurately as a form of blackmail, by claiming they were powerless to increase pay and that only Stormont could make such a decision. That, of course, is one huge pile of horse manure and even the dogs on the street know it. All the money in Stormont comes from Westminster. With the stroke of a pen, the Tories could’ve increased wages. But they stubbornly refused any such move. Instead, they offered £600m for the wage increases as part of a bigger financial package, if and only if Stormont was restored. The legalities of such action, that of denying workers their rights in order to play political games, are dubious to say the least.
Again, I won’t bore you with the tedious details of how the DUP eventually capitulated but suffice to say that the Stormont Assembly resumed in February 2024.
Despite that, there is yet no resolution to the public sector pay problem. Since coming into post, the new finance minister has offered pay deals to civil servants and health staff and to public transport workers. The new education minister has made an offer to teachers. The transport workers have rejected the offer and will continue to strike. The civil servants and health staff are still considering their offer, as are the teachers.
Social costs
The strikes have strong support from the public. Most people recognise why the workers are striking, they see it as only right that these workers get fair pay, and they accept that the workers don’t want to strike but see no other way. The strikes are causing disruption to public services and to the local economy. The media of course have focused less on the plight of the workers and more on the negative impacts, such as the suspension of cancer treatment during the strikes and the impact on trade for the retail and hospitality sectors. Certainly, the negatives are real. I, myself, talked to an employee in the hospitality sector who said she supported the strikers but with there being no buses it meant she struggled to get to work, and either had to pay for taxis or miss her shifts altogether. The fact is the whole point of striking is to create disruption and to raise the social costs. The irony is that it’s the most vulnerable in society or just average people who feel those costs most, and that can create animosity instead of solidarity, especially the longer the strikes go on.
I can’t help thinking about Yemen’s Ansarallah and their current blockade of maritime traffic connected to Israel that is traveling through the Red Sea. While the ideal would be the existence of no such campaign, of no genocide in Gaza, of no war anywhere, we are far from the ideal and Ansarallah are operating within the sad realities of our corrupted world. The Ansarallah goal is to force Israel to stop the genocide in Gaza. Their blockade targets Israeli economic interests, not human life; the blockade goes after ships associated with Israel, no other ships; the blockade doesn’t sink or seize ships, but diverts them from their course. Ansarallah’s blockade is about raising the social costs to those in power, hitting them where it hurts most. And while they haven’t yet achieved their goal of ending the genocide, they’re certainly causing damage to the Israeli economy, costing it billions of dollars and disrupting supply chains.
I wonder if we can learn from Ansarallah and pinpoint ways of raising the social costs to those with power as we travel the road of radical change. It’s a thought and I’m not advocating that we buy helicopters and start commandeering ships. I’m using the Ansarallah campaign as an example of an intelligent and efficient use of resources to achieve an end goal.
But back to the North of Ireland and to the strikes here. What action can be taken by those seeking social change to minimises the social costs to the average person who’s just trying to make a living, while maximising the social costs to those who have the power to implement the change sought? And now that there are hundreds of thousands of people here energised and taking action, what can be done to maximise and prolong the potential of that activism?
Solidarity, vision and strategy
To my mind, this is where solidarity, vision and strategy enter the fray. Widespread solidarity and overarching vision and strategy are often missing from this kind of brave activism. Yet greater solidarity and greater unity in a common vision and strategy would go a long way to resolving the problem of who suffers most from raising the social costs.
Let’s first look at solidarity. The public sector workers in the North have essentially formed a powerful workers’ movement. The North already has several movements, some large and vibrant, others more muted and embryonic. There’s the grassroots movement to promote and protect the Irish language, An Dream Dearg (Red Dream). In the summer of 2022, they held a rally in Belfast that was attended by nearly 17,000 people who filled the streets around City Hall. There’s also a large pro-Palestinian / anti-war movement. This has become increasingly active since October 2023 and Israel’s most recent onslaught on Palestine, and people have been turning out in their thousands, week after week, to protest. There’s a Black Lives Matter movement here, brought into existence in 2020 following the callous murder of George Floyd. The Pride movement has also grown in popularity over recent years and energetic, carnival-style rallies take place every summer in major urban areas across the North.
These movements have members in common. An Dream Dearg have declared support for Palestine. Several of the trade unions involved in the public sector strikes openly support Palestine. Their members and leaders have joined the pro-Palestinian protests and spoken out against the genocide. There’s even a Trade Union Friends of Palestine group. Many of those involved in the pro-Palestinian / anti-war movement are also involved in the public sector strikes and An Dream Dearg. It’s stating the obvious that public sector workers can be gay, black, support Palestine or want to protect the Irish language. And on and on go the many permutations of interrelationships between them all.
What they have in common is their desire for social change of one sort or another, although some struggle to get enough support to achieve the social change they want. They could reach greater success if they were in solidarity with the other movements. In fact, they would all benefit by having the support of each other. The other movements could, right now, join the public sector workers and support them in their efforts to win pay increases. Such solidarity would bolster the striking workers but would also send a loud message to politicians and decision-makers that better pay for public sectors workers is important to more than just the workers, it’s important to wider society too.
It’s worth considering what happens when a movement makes progress towards achieving its goals. If, for instance, the striking public sector workers win their pay increases, will they disband? Say the teachers take a pay deal but the health workers don’t – will the teachers abandon the strikes and go meekly back into their trenches, leaving the others to continue alone? If they all take pay deals and end their strikes, where will that energy and momentum go? Will it disappear like smoke on the wind?
Which brings us to vision and strategy. Given the commonalities among these movements, would there be any possibility they could unite to create and then work towards a common vision and strategy? Could the energy and momentum be harnessed and prolonged to achieve not just a one-off reform but multiple non-reformist reforms? The public sector workers are striking for a single demand to meet their own needs. But what if that demand was one goal within a broader strategy to achieve a widely accepted vision for radical transformation?
What if the striking workers didn’t stop at achieving their pay rise? Because wages across society are way short of equitable, what if the strikes were seen as just one tactic along the way for fairer wages? What if instead the public sector workers continued campaigning, this time for a living wage for all workers in the North, where we understand a living wage to be a fair wage that increases based on the cost of living. What if they were joined by the other movements in doing so? And joined too by the hundreds of thousands of non-public sector workers living on poverty wages, who are denied wage increases, who were hardest hit by the bus and train strikes?
What if, in continuing this sustained and augmented strike action, all of these movements took measures to minimise the social costs to the regular people who are normally hit hardest by strikes? So, a strike by health workers would keep enough staff in place to treat emergency cases and provide critical care (I should point out that during the current strikes, health workers did take such measures). A strike by teachers would provide alternative day care for the children of those who stand to lose income if they miss work because of a strike. A public transport strike would offer a skeleton service to get people to and from work. Since all of these movements are united, a mega-strike could be organised to occur simultaneously across sectors so everybody is on strike rather than having to be at their place of work.
Putting such mitigating measures in place is certainly a challenge and they’re rare applied. But going the extra mile to reduce the social costs to the people you don’t want to hurt would serve to create greater solidarity. And having a movement of movements in itself would give strikers access to additional resources which in turn would make implementing the mitigating measure more plausible.
While all of that holds true, there’s more at stake than a battle for wages. What if this movement of movements in the North decided that wages were merely the beginning and that once better wages were won, the next step was to achieve better working conditions such as secure jobs, a 4-day work week, subsidised childcare, participatory workplaces, or worker ownership altogether?
What if the united vision and strategy didn’t limit itself to workers’ pay and conditions? What if it was expanded to reach so much more? What if it included participatory budgeting where the people would have a say in how public budgets were to be spent; a universal basic income; meaningful rights and equality for minority groups; mutual banking to retain local wealth and use it for the benefit of people and planet rather than the benefit of the global finance system; tax justice and progressive taxation; social and co-operative housing; a properly funded health service and education system; community- and publically-owned renewable energy to create energy independence and move away from fossil fuels; sustainable farming and food production; a demand for fiscal control or even better, independence from Britain and a return to the EU; the implementation of a local Green New Deal and a genuine and just transition to a post-capitalist society? What if the post-capitalist society in this united vision and strategy was to be a participatory society, free from racism, sexism, patriarchy, classism and authoritarianism and where there would be an alternative to the inadequate democratic system and existing family and cultural institutions? And what if this united vision and strategy was joined with international movements, forging alliances that could bring about radical transformation beyond Ireland?
What if indeed?
END NOTE
[1] Ireland was an English/British colony for over 800 years before it won partial independence in 1921, at which time it was partitioned into two jurisdictions: 1) the North or “Northern Ireland”, made up of 6 counties with a majority Protestant population that remained under British rule (and remains so today); and 2) the South or “Republic of Ireland”, made up of 26 counties and with a majority Catholic population that gained freedom from Britain. The North is governed by the British government at Westminster and has a devolved administration called Stormont. The 6 counties of the North were cherry-picked to ensure it would have a majority pro-British population, i.e. majority Protestant. Through gerrymandering and other policies e.g. denying civil rights to the largely Catholic Irish-identifying population, forcing them to emigrate for work, the North maintained its Protestant hegemony. That has changed in recent years, however, and today the Catholic and Protestant populations are almost equal in size.
Bridget Meehan is a writer and activist based in Ireland. She is co-founder of the Northern Mutual bank campaign and member of Collaboration for Change (CfC), a grassroots activists’ network promoting collective activism across Ireland. Bridget believes non-reformist projects like CfC can be the foundation for the participatory society of the future. As an advocate for a participatory society, she is a member of Real Utopia, an organisation dedicated to advancing participatory society.
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