THE European Commission recently released the results of an EU wide survey of attitudes to poverty. They are published in the current issue of Poverty Today. One of the questions asked was whether the respondent had ever actually seen the conditions in which the poor live. Quite a wide choice of answers was offered never yes, but rarely yes, sometimes yes, often and don't know. The answers were rather astonishing.
Some 45 per cent of people in Ireland admitted they had never seen the conditions in which poor people live. Even though Irish rates of poverty are higher than those for the EU as a whole, and there is therefore more poverty to see, this figure was significantly higher than the EU average. Not much less than half the Irish adult population, it seems, has never seen a run down housing estate or a bleak tower block, or a rat infested dump of a temporary halting site.
And, on second thoughts, this is not all that strange. We have, as a society, gone to great lengths to concentrate the poor in huge reservations on the edges of our cities where other people don't have to look at them. How many people, after all, have even a mental image of the estates in Tallaght where there is 70 per cent unemployment?
I was thinking about this revelation during the week when the closure of the Packard plant in Tallaght was on every news bulletin. That closure, on previous experience, is the moment at which, for 800 families, poverty begins. For a brief moment, the people who are about to lose their jobs are visible, even ubiquitous. You can see them on the news, look at their pictures in the paper. But you also imagine them disappearing from view. As many of them slip into long term unemployment, the root cause of most poverty in Ireland, they will also become invisible. They will slip into a category of existence very many of their fellow citizens never, ever see. They have but a short time before the nation's eyes turn elsewhere.
Two other findings of the survey also have a bearing on the Packard closure and the way we talk about it. One is that there is a huge degree of fatalism about poverty in Ireland. A large majority of Irish respondents when asked to identify the causes of poverty pointed to bad luck, laziness, and (much the largest category) economic inevitability. Thirty one per cent of Irish people surveyed felt that poverty is "an inevitable part of the way in which the world is going". On the other side of the same question, ("who should respond to poverty?"), people were allowed to pick three choices from seven kinds of groups. Just one Irish person in eight chose "companies" by far the lowest score of any of the groups.
So, you can sum up the attitudes which we bring to bear on an event like the Packard closure as follows it is an inevitable part of the way the world is going, the company is not responsible for the consequences, and most of us, in any case, won't see what those consequences are.
THESE, for the most part, are unspoken assumptions, but there is a more explicit and sophisticated version of them. It is used by Mary Harney and Michael McDowell and by conservative economic commentators. For "inevitability" it substitutes "globalisation". It proposes that the only thing we can do about global competition is to surrender to its logic by cutting taxes and wages, by getting government out of the marketplace, in the hope that we might then be able to compete with the low wage economies of Asia and Eastern Europe. And it, too, depends on making certain things the actual social consequences of low wages and the kind of cuts in social services that would follow from low taxes invisible.
It is now nearly 15 years since the Telesis report pointed out that Ireland would he wasting its time trying to use low wages to get a competitive advantage in world trade. Labour costs in Irish manufacturing industry are already much lower than those of Ireland's major trading partners, and have been falling significantly in relative terms. And, in any case, competitiveness is about far more than wage costs. In a 1993 international survey of competitiveness in manufacturing industry in 38 countries, using no fewer than 371 different criteria, Ireland performed best in terms of unit labour cost. But it was placed only 13th in overall competitiveness. It is in relation to all the other things that make a company competitive investment, skills, technological innovation that Ireland really has problems.
The Packard closure does have things to teach us about living in a global economy in which multinational companies control a third of global productive assets and a thousand billion dollars is traded every day on the world's financial markets. It shows that everything that socialists have always said about certain kinds of multinational company is true. Companies like Packard are ruthless, relentless, cynical, unprepared to take responsibility for the social consequences of their actions. The appalling callousness of the way in which the workers learned that their jobs were to go was just an expression of a much deeper attitude.
Packard paid its workers badly average take home pay is £160 a week bullied them into working 41 hours a week for 39 hours pay, and threatened them more or less continually with unemployment. And no amount of appeasement, no abject concession, was finally enough. There was, in the end, nothing either the Packard workers or any Irish government could have done to make such a company stay in Tallaght if there were higher profits to be earned by moving elsewhere. Cutting taxes for lower paid workers makes great sense in itself, but it is blindingly obvious that it has nothing to do with Packard's decision to close Tallaght.
THE great fallacy of the Mary Harney/Michael McDowell line of argument is that it misses a very simple connection the multinational companies which pay the lowest wages are also the most footloose and most likely to move elsewhere. They pay low wages because they are engaged in industrial processes that can be carried on pretty well anywhere. And they are also the companies most likely to replace workers with machines.
Conversely, the multinational companies which pay high wages are the ones most likely to stay in Ireland and least likely to lose jobs to new technology. They pay high wages because the skills of their employees are a scarce asset, not easy to pick up on the world market and not easy to replace with machines. Turning Ireland into a low wage economy would merely make us even more vulnerable to the ruthless mobility of multinational capital than we are already.
Making the country safe for the Packards of this world is a mug's game. And telling the Packard workers their problem is that they don't come cheap enough is not just insulting but factually wrong. The job of the State now is to invest in those workers so that they can get better jobs at higher wages with better companies before they, too, slip into the invisible world of poverty.