According to the Irish Independent a total of 66,000 Personal Public Service Numbers (PPNs) were issued in the period May to October. The numbers are running at around 11,000 a month and the applicants mainly come from the newer EU members. It's reasonable to assume that,once we exclude seasonal student workers, at least two-thirds will join the permanent labour force. It may well be that at this stage immigrant labour accounts for over half of the growth in the labour force.
These workers come relatively cheaply and this will be confirmed by Revenue figures which will show scarcely a blip in the total PAYE tax take, which means that most of these workers are earning too little to pay any income tax. The writer in the Indo points out that some 11,000 jobs were lost there, but 8,000 extra foreign-born workers were employed. It looks like there is replacement of Irish employees, as employers faced with cheaper competition abroad seek cheaper workers at home. So it's not just Irish Ferries that want to yellow-pack their workforce. While we lack systematic data across different sectors there is plenty of anecdotal evidence of this phenomenon. Examples include six Polish and one Slovak worker being paid €2 an hour by a Dublin plastering company and the Roadstone hauliers who are in the process of being replaced by cheaper immigrant labour.
Meanwhile the settlement at Irish Ferries is presented by SIPTU as a success in ensuring that the "threshold of decency" is maintained. The Unions deserve credit for mobilising tens of thousands of people on the streets last Friday and the positive media coverage would have contributed to the settlement. It was hardly a resounding union victory and union leaders should not think in terms of slinking back to partnership and business as usual. One thing that unions will have to come to terms with is that Ireland is now part of a huge labour market and, it seem, labour is a more mobile factor of production than previously assumed.
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