Ill-judged ICG tactics play into hands of Siptu

Business Opinion: Eamonn Rothwell is the best thing for the Irish trade union movement since Jim Larkin. The Irish Continental Group chief executive's ham-fisted attempt to to restructure the Irish sea operations of ICG may be threatening the next national wage agreement and hurting exporters, but it has lanced a boil.

And judging by the reaction, it was a boil that has needed lancing for quite a while.

The top brass in Siptu must have must have danced for joy when ICG issued its ultimatum to its workers. On the face of it, here was a financially sound quoted Irish company trying to replace expensive Irish workers with cheaper migrants from one of the new EU accession states.

In addition, ICG was tailor-made for high profile industrial action. It was a household name and its activities - passenger ferries in particular - were extremely vulnerable to militant action because of the huge numbers of "innocent" members of the public who stand to be inconvenienced.

The cherry on the cake was the tone and presentation of ICG's proposal.

It came in the form of a callous ultimatum, the upshot of which was that Irish Ferries staff could take a pay-off or a pay-cut.

It was an open goal and Siptu wasted no time in putting four or five balls in the net. The clumsy actions of the ICG management in the days that followed, culminating in the smuggling of security staff on board to facilitate changing over crews, allowed Siptu wipe the floor with ICG management on the airwaves and elsewhere.

It has been a very, very successful campaign and the issue of Irish workers being displaced by cheaper foreign workers is now very much on the political agenda.

There may well be a few more skirmishes but the talks on the next wage agreement will get under way sometime in the New Year and the whole issue of job displacement will figure largely in the outcome.

Its a job well done. The only loose end is the the minor inconvenience of the Irish Ferries workers.

ICG may have been a heaven-sent opportunity to highlight the real issues surrounding job displacement and the exploitation of migrants, but in many ways it was a highly inappropriate example.

As has been said many times in what passed for debate in the weeks that followed ICG's announcement, shipping is a different business.

Regardless of how you feel about it, what ICG claims it is compelled to do to in order to cut costs on its Irish sea ferries cannot really be done in the wider economy. You may be able to re-flag a ship but you cannot re-flag a factory. It really is not legally possible to reduce the terms and conditions of Irish workers below the legal thresholds.

What you can do with a factory, however, is move it to a place where workers are cheaper and this has been a global economic reality for more than 30 years. Ireland - when it was a genuinely low-cost location - was a huge beneficiary of this trend. Now that costs have gone up, it is seeing jobs lost to low-cost countries on a regular basis. By and large most players - including the trade unions - accept the real challenge is to adapt economic policy to these challenges.

This analysis poses a number of interesting questions. The first is why did Siptu turn a very unpleasant single company problem into a national issue complete with a day of action scheduled for Friday?

In doing so they have ignored numerous realities, such as the minimum wage legislation and a whole raft of labour law and industrial relations infrastructure that the wider trade union movement has fought for over the years.

ICG may have sidestepped them, but the reality is that other Irish companies cannot.

Siptu has also ignored the fact that the vast majority of the Irish Ferries workers - who are members of the Seamen's union and not Siptu at all - have accepted the redundancy terms on offer from ICG.

Their decision is presumably based on their first-hand knowledge of the competitive realities of the shipping business.

One possibility is that Siptu has cynically manipulated the ICG situation. This would imply that in order to get the genuine issues raised by the arrival since EU enlargement of tens of thousands of migrant workers on the agenda they have created this straw man. It has misleadingly given the impression that there is a very real threat of the large-scale displacement of Irish workers by exploited cheaper labour from abroad and that ICG is the thin end of the wedge.

If this is the case then Siptu has done the trade union movement and ICG workers in particular a disservice. It's preferable - and quite likely that when you look at the genuine emotion that seems to overtake at least some Siptu officials when they talk about ICG - that they do believe they are involved in a last-ditch struggle and that some really important principles are at stake.

Hopefully, and presumably, some of the wiser heads in the Irish Congress of Trade Unions will prevail. One suspects David Beggs wants next Friday's march like he wants a hole in the head.