Recent correspondence on this page about the Ryanair dispute suggests that a fair number of our readers think this is 1913 and Jim Larkin is holding out for the poor, oppressed workers against the cruel, capitalist bosses. Take Esther Steele, for example, whose words are beyond parody, and almost beyond belief.
She wrote: "The `Uncle Toms' who spoke out against the Ryanair baggage handlers disgusted me with their betrayal of fellow workers. I have not seen the like since my grandfather was beaten up by fellow workers when trying to organise a trade union when I was a little girl. I genuinely thought those days were long gone, but how wrong I was. Well done to the brave baggage handlers and to my union SIPTU."
Hold on there a minute, Esther. Nobody was beaten up or inconvenienced by the Ryanair workers who continued to work, nor by management, nor threatened, nor abused. Nobody was sacked. Nobody was victimised. What happened simply was that striking workers who were picketing in the control area of the airport had their security passes revoked by Ryanair management, and rightly. Those passes exist for the security of the airport, not for the furtherance of an industrial dispute.
Disproportionate response
The response by the SIPTU members at the airport was grossly disproportionate. They effectively closed the airport down for a weekend solely because Ryanair employees were not allowed to place pickets in a security area. Bizarrely, the handful of striking Ryanair employees were unable to close down the airline with which they were in dispute, but they were able to close down Aer Lingus completely, causing utter disruption not merely in Dublin but to Aer Lingus operations throughout Europe.
Thousands of people lost their flights and their holidays, hundreds spent the best part of the weekend camped at an airport where the lavatories had ceased to function, where there was no food, and where there was complete uncertainty.
Humphrey Murphy of the The Hook, Wexford, wrote that the extent to which I was in touch with the real world became clearer when I described the airport strike as causing appalling suffering: "Mr Myers would appear to be one runway short of a landing."
Nice try, Humph. Try a little bit harder next time when you reach for the aeronautical metaphor. A runway short of a landing doesn't make sense. What you probably meant was one runway short of an airport. Ah, well. You can only get better.
Uproar in press
As for appalling suffering, Humph, you no doubt think that the workers are roit on, man, workers' roits and all that, but that's dingbat stuff from the 1960s. The workers who were genuinely suffering were those unfortunates who were forced by pickets to leave their buses and taxis a mile away on the Belfast road, and who had to carry their bags all the way to a terminal that was one airline short of being an airport.
There many of them spent the weekend, huddled on seats, lying on floors, hungry, dirty, exhausted, waiting for the transatlantic flight or the holiday departure which wasn't going to take place. Had any private entrepreneur caused such suffering there would have been uproar in the press and television, and you, Humph, might have been penning indignant letters about the cruel bosses and the appalling suffering they caused.
You think "appalling suffering" too strong, Humph? well, I concede, it's not Sarajevo or Beirut, not the Bosnian corridor nor South Lebanon, where I confess I have - no doubt like you Humph - seen far worse. We should not need to measure suffering by the absolute scales of genocide and murder, or we would tolerate a thousand little abuses and a myriad of minor tyrannies daily.
What Esther and Humph did not comment on - indeed nobody seems to have commented on it outside this column - is the extent to which the RTE news coverage rowed in behind the striking SIPTU workers. I have already written of the disgraceful censorship which caused RTE television news not to report on Ryanair's order for Boeing 737s - the biggest single order in Irish commercial history. Yet it used clips from the interview in which this purchase was discussed to keep the Ryanair strike story going even after the strike was over. This was a simple, straightforward violation of the RTE charter. Had it been perpetrated in such a flagrant and deliberate fashion against SIPTU, there would have been uproar in the station - and rightly.
Rising share price
Ryanair did not lose in its dispute. Its share price has been rising steadily, and its cash flow is so mighty that it has been able to fund the purchase of five 737s largely from its own balance sheet, and with little borrowing. The strike has almost certainly hardened the resolve of management not to let SIPTU anywhere near its operations: and who can blame it?
The people who must be privately most critical of the idiocy of the strike are the SIPTU leaders, who have established an admirable record of steadiness and caution in their approach to industrial relations. The picket-line bullying, the abuse of Ryanair workers, the - yes - appalling hardship caused to passengers - that is truly a reminder of the bad old days in the 1970s and 1980s. The truth now is that thanks to the Ryanair strike, SIPTU has not merely lost this battle, but will probably not be allowed in any US-owned company. The gun went off; and look at the hole in SIPTU's foot.