Irish workers were urged yesterday to help their American counterparts by resisting a "race to the bottom" in employment standards.
American author and political campaigner Barbara Ehrenreich told delegates to the Ictu conference that the US had become a case study in what happens "when unions grow weak and when the working class lets down its guard".
This was because a "US-style attack" on the welfare state, if copied in Europe, would make it easier for the ruling elites in the United States to say: " 'look, this is just the way things are. There is no alternative, not even in Europe'," she said.
Ms Ehrenreich is the author of the best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, in which she outlined her experiences working in low-paid jobs in the US.
"There are no employees in America any more. Everyone is an 'associate' or a 'team member'." She had begun the two-year exercise after comparing the pay rates for jobs advertised in local newspapers with the rents quoted for apartments.
She told the conference she had found the jobs demanding. They had, however, been even harder than they needed to be because of the rules laid down by employers, such as prohibitions on drinking water or talking to colleagues.
One of the "first big blows against the poor" in the US that had caught her attention, she said, was the welfare reform of 1996, which had ended cash support from the government for poor single mothers and was achieved through "vicious attacks" on welfare recipients.
These were based on a reactionary theory of poverty, "which is that it's a character defect". Ms Ehrenreich said she had another theory on poverty "which is that it is a shortage of money", but "trying to push that in the US is not easy".
The promise of welfare reform was that if the four million single mothers affected went out and got jobs, their poverty would be "cured".
Incidentally, the Bush administration had added its own angle on welfare reform: "They have a new solution to poverty for women - and that is marriage. It would work actually," she joked, "if they would draft CEOs to marry poor women."
