`Tallaght is no Beverly Hills, but a carpenter cannot afford to buy a house there." This is how one striker put it at the Sisk site in Swords last week.
Thousands of houses have been built in the construction boom of the past few years. Carpenters, bricklayers, labourers have worked hard and long to meet the demand. Yet the people who build the houses cannot afford to live in them. Is it any wonder they are angry?
Once any group of workers act like Oliver Twist and ask for a little more, they are told they will destroy social partnership and kill the Celtic Tiger.
Those issuing the condemnations never seem to blush at their inconsistencies. Bertie Ahern can lecture teachers on their outlandish claim and then enjoy a pay rise of £36,000 - more than most teachers earn in a year.
Social partnership is a nice idea. It implies co-operation and sharing. It suggests all sections of society should pull together to look after "the excluded". Unfortunately, it is also a myth. In reality, the Celtic Tiger has seen a major increase in inequality.
According to the United Nations Human Development report, Ireland has the second-highest level of poverty in the developed world. Casualisation and low pay have become major features of our workforce. Between 1988 and 1997 part-time, temporary and short-term contract employment has risen by 165 per cent.
Ireland now comes second to the US in having the highest proportion of its workforce categorised as low-paid. An occupational pension has become a thing of the past for nearly two-thirds of all private-sector employees.
FAR from social partnership, the past decade has seen a one-sided class war where there has been a determined effort to redistribute wealth to the already privileged.
When social partnership agreements began in 1987, the share of the national economy going to profits, dividends, interest and rent - in other words to owners of capital - was 31 per cent. A decade later it had risen to 41 per cent, with a corresponding fall in the share going to PAYE employees and social welfare recipients.
This transfer of wealth has occurred even though Irish workers have shown extraordinary increases in productivity, often at the cost of increased stress and more unsocial hours of work.
The main reason for this growing inequality is that wages have been restrained for over a decade through the partnership deals.
Everything else is deregulated. Rents can shoot up, the price of building land can go sky-high, profits can soar but wages are to be strictly controlled. It is claimed this is done on a "voluntary basis", and hence regulation is legitimate.
But this argument is wearing thin. Last February the majority of trade unionists voted to accept a 5.5 per cent pay rise mainly because they were told by Government Ministers, economists and union leaders that inflation would not rise above 3 or 4 per cent.
Those assumptions were proved wrong and a new PPF review agreement was put in place. But workers were never given a vote on this new review. It was assumed the ICTU knew best.
Some will undoubtedly reply that workers have been compensated for low pay rises with significant tax cuts. But the major tax cuts have gone to those who have shown least restraint.
In 1987, when social partnership began, tax on company profits stood at 50 per cent. By 2002 this will have fallen to 12.5 per cent, the lowest in the European Union.
Banks making over £1 million a day in profit will pay out a lower proportion of their surplus in tax than workers who get up in the middle of the night to clean offices.
We now have corporate welfare as well as social welfare. Each year about £2,500 million is given out in tax breaks and grants to business. While social welfare recipients are periodically scapegoated, there is little discussion on who is paying for corporate welfare.
In the aftermath of the British miners' strike, social partnership was accepted by Irish workers as an alternative to Thatcherism. It was a con-trick. The political establishment changed the formulations but kept the formulas of neo-liberal economics.
There has been a type of Thatcherism by stealth where public services are being sold off and a fabulously wealthy Golden Circle enjoys the fruits of an Atlantic tax haven. The aim and achievement of social partnership was to disarm the labour movement by co-opting its leadership.
There are signs this is changing. An international anti-capitalist movement has arisen to challenge the type of globalisation synonymous with putting profit before people's needs. And ironically labour shortages have led to a new confidence among workers.
The Golden Circle may no longer have it all their own way. And that is something worth celebrating.
Kieran Allen is a lecturer in sociology in UCD and is author of Celtic Tiger: The Myth of Social Partnership Kieran.Allen@ucd.ie.
Vincent Browne is on leave