Fintan O'Toole is at his polemical and analytical best in his Irish Times column this morning. His point is about the ramifications of the Irish Ferries dispute as it extends far beyond industrial relations. He says that a lot hangs on the dispute, especially in terms of how cheap migrant labour might be used in the future to "create an Ireland riven by ethnic divisions, in which migrants retreat into physical and cultural ghettoes while disgruntled working-class natives rally under the banners of the extreme right". He also cites figures from the Central Statistics Office that show that there are many migrant workers in Ireland working for very low wages, in many cases at half of the minimum hourly rate. So it's clear that many Irish employers are already benefiting from cheap migrant labour. It's worth quoting a couple of key paragraphs in full:
The exploited migrant worker gets the message that she is worth less than the native. The native worker comes to blame the bloody foreigner for taking his job or forcing wages down, and begins to pine for an imagined past when everyone was white and Irish and things were better. The short-term gain for some employers comes with the price-tag of an ethnically divided society in which two under-classes, the exploited immigrants and the old working-class whose dignity has been eroded, glower at each other across new barriers of religion and culture.
If this isn't enough damage, add another twist. Make the European Union, potentially the most civilised political project of our times, the vehicle for all of this harm. Turn the generous impulses of those (including the bulk of the trade union movement) who supported EU enlargement into the concrete reality of Latvian workers on less than half the minimum wage and without the protection of Irish labour law directly replacing Irish jobs. Wave the Services Directive around like holy scripture in which the almighty commission decrees that you can't protect national standards of employment.
The raw materials already exist for someone to fashion an ugly xenophobic and Eurosceptic political discourse and there are plenty of examples from continental Europe that show this can be done in a more sophisticated way than the skinhead hooligan British National Party. It doesn't help that what passes for immigration policy is really driven by the perceived requirement of economic migrants to fill jobs that may not be sustainable in the long term. There has never been a proper debate about what a sensible policy on immigration should be. There are advocacy groups that defend asylum seekers and refugees and there are officially sanctioned anti-racist campaigns. That's all very fine but it is now time to look at the issue, in a more general way in terms of its implications for citizenship and democracy, but also in very particular areas of public policy such as housing, schools, social welfare and health. If we don't do it now we'll never manage it if things turn nasty.
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