Madam, – Your Editorial (January 16th) asserts that the proposed industrial action by public servants “devalues the huge contribution made recently by thousands of local authority and front-line workers in keeping main roads open, helping farmers and providing emergency services”.
Might I suggest that the Government, supported by private sector employers, have already devalued this contribution through the campaign of vilification orchestrated before the budget, and ultimately by the pay cut that followed the pension levy applied in the previous budget.
It is time for action. It is time to show just what public servants do, usually unseen, for this country, by removing or curtailing those services.
The lives of some front-line workers are often put at risk. Such people did not deserve the treatment they received in the recent budget. That, not the forthcoming strikes, is the wrongdoing. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Not all private sector companies in this State go out of business after making a loss, nor do they all become insolvent.
In two of the largest private sector companies in the State, namely Bank of Ireland and AIB, people did not lose their jobs and the companies in question did not go to the wall.
On the contrary, their employees received a wage increase while public sector workers took a pay cut of at least 10 per cent within the last year.
To add insult to injury, while both companies contributed to the virtual bankruptcy of this State, said public sector workers, among others, have been asked, in effect, to fund the wage increases mentioned above.
Maybe the Editor of The Irish Times should take a reality check. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Jack O’Connor’s letter (January 18th) repeats the familiar trade union rhetoric.
There is nothing uniquely “front line” about trade union members’ work. Is the work of the physiotherapist, the plumber, the milkman not equally crucial to the effective operation of our society? The inference that only public sector workers have borne pay cuts is inaccurate and unfair.
His letter amounts to no more than a PR exercise in advance of his union’s proposed strike action.
Words like “sabotaged”, “protecting the interests” and “front-line services” are the battle cry of unions’ destructive and unhelpful approach to our economic problem.
We are all in this situation together, regardless of which sector we belong to.
Each of us has to readjust to this new situation in a mature, intelligent way. There is no place for the temper-tantrum that is striking. Holding the Government, and the rest of us, to ransom, is divisive, selfish and immoral.
Trade unions and striking had a role to play when children were forced to work in mines and women worked 14 hours a day in dangerous factories.
They now belong in the history books, not in the negotiating rooms, where a new Ireland must be forged by fair-minded, innovative and visionary people. – Yours etc,
Madam, – Your leading article chides union officials for their insouciant approach to effecting a remedy. It adds that, “there is a price to be paid, and it must be shared equitably”, but makes no reference whatever to the unbearably unfair actions taken by our Government in order to put matters right.
As long as the public service pension levy is imposed on ubiquitous office cleaners at a greater percentage than that applied to senior civil servants, and while one-quarter of our judges opt to pay none, your headline, “Time for reality check”, will remain a pipe dream. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – Now that our trade unions are showing belated signs of taking action in defence of the pay and conditions of their members, the “paper of record” produces another castigatory Editorial.
Has it not occurred to you that public servants, who worked so hard to keep the country going during the recent severe weather, did so in spite of pay cuts, and that they deserve better in the way of public commentary than yet another demand for improved “productivity”?
In the same issue, F Mac E, in “Thinking Anew”, writes: “drumming up mass hysteria against an identifiable group is the first step in any war, pogrom or revolution”. Your editorial writer might reflect on this in the light of the strong anti-public service bias shown by your paper in recent months. – Yours, etc,