OPINION:IT USED to be said that having a job provided a direct route out of poverty. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, writes Sally Ann Kinahan
Instead, as the pace of globalisation has increased and more workers have been drawn into the world labour market, we have witnessed an alarming growth in poorly paid, low-skilled and insecure work.
Ireland, with its record levels of job creation over the last 15 years, has not been immune to this dangerous trend. Indeed, it has been a feature of the boom years and is most clearly manifested in the yawning pay gap in our economy: between, for example, top bank executives, some of whom averaged approximately €1,500 an hour last year and the one million people who earned less than €15.50 an hour.
The Central Statistics Office national employment survey, published last month, makes for worrying reading, particularly in the context of what has all the appearances of a deepening recession.
The CSO figures reveal that almost one-fifth of the Irish workforce - some 200,000 people - earn less than €10 per hour. They are hardly well placed to shoulder even higher prices or greater cutbacks in services.
The greatest concentration of this new workforce is to be found in sales, restaurants and hotels (readers may remember that hotel owners went to court earlier this year and successfully blocked an increase for their staff of some 22 cent per hour).
In addition to low-paid work, we also appear to have proven adept at creating a large number of low-skilled and therefore highly insecure jobs.
Over the period 2001-2006, in excess of 55,000 new, net posts were created for labourers, 9,000 more cleaners, 7,000 more labourers in manufacturing and 6,700 extra in construction. The majority were in the 15-24 age range and had lower secondary education or less. This has major implications for policymakers seeking to chart a way out of current difficulties.
It is quite obvious that education holds the key to the creation of quality, long-term employment.
So while Ireland Inc has doubled its workforce over the last two decades there are many reasons to be worried at the quality of the jobs created.
Moreover there are also reasons to worry and wonder whether we have not actually overseen the creation of a new and "gainfully employed" underclass.
As yet unpublished research, carried out for the Congress of Trade Unions by Dr James Wickham, head of the Employment Research Centre at Trinity College, Dublin, would appear to support this contention: "There is some evidence that new casualised sectors are emerging where labour legislation is simply ignored and managerial control is arbitrary.
"There is a real risk that sections of the catering and hotel industry, care industry, agriculture and construction become immigrant ghettoes reliant on transitory employees with effectively no rights. Women immigrants are particularly at risk here."
Dr Wickham also goes on to warn: "While immigrants are normally those who are denied equal opportunities, it is important to be aware that immigration creates the possibilities that 'native' employees will be on the receiving end of discrimination."
This is where World Day for Decent Work comes in. Tomorrow has been designated as the inaugural World Day for Decent Work by the global union movement, under the auspices of the International Trade Union Confederation which includes the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.
With such a tremendous downward pressure on pay and standards at home and abroad, the event marks a timely and much-needed attempt to reverse that trend and exert a countervailing upward pressure.
Moreover, there is no doubt this is an idea whose time has come, in a global economy where: 1.4 billion people earn less than $2 per day; 12.3 million are trapped in forced labour; up to 93 per cent of the jobs on offer to young people are informal and unprotected; women earn less and comprise the majority of casual/informal workers; more than 100 trade unionists are murdered every year simply for trying to organise people into unions.
The old world order imploded spectacularly on Wall Street last week.
We now require a new order, a new globalisation that acts to raise standards and end the race to the bottom that has characterised the last two decades, in particular.
In any sphere of human activity, the bargain basement approach may deliver short-term gains for a minority, but ultimately it will cost us all.
Sally Anne Kinahan is assistant general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions