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Letter of support for British Airways cabin crew
17 Dec 2009, 12:25 pm |
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The socialist response to the budget
16 Dec 2009, 11:41 am |
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Abolition of Bin Charge Waiver Vindicates Campaign
16 Dec 2009, 11:34 am |
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Joe Higgins MEP Responds to Brutal Budget
10 Dec 2009, 12:18 pm |
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Determined fight from unions needed to stop government onslaught
9 Dec 2009, 1:41 pm |
Events
11 past eventsSee All
- LIMERICK - Budget '09, the Soc...
Upstairs, Magners Bar, Roches St., ...
Wednesday, December 9 at 8:00pm - Forum for Young People: How Ca...
Central Hotel,
Tuesday, November 3 at 7:00pm - Limerick Lisbon Debate
Pery's Best Western Hotel
Monday, September 21 at 7:45pm - Cork Lisbon Debate
Metropole Hotel.
Friday, September 18 at 7:30pm - Limerick Lisbon Debate
Pery's Best Western Hotel
Wednesday, September 16 at 4:00pm - Vote for Joe Higgins
Your local polling station
Friday, June 5 at 8:00am - Don Baker and Dermot Byrne Fun...
O’Sheas Hotel on 19 Talbot Street
Sunday, May 31 at 4:30pm - Forum For Young People - On El...
Cental Hotel, Exchequer Street (jus...
Saturday, May 30 at 3:30pm - Joe Higgins Live Q&A Session
www.joehiggins.eu & the IFI
Sunday, May 24 at 5:00pm - Dingle Trad Night
The Hilgrove
Friday, May 8 at 9:30pm
New story from Joe Higgins.eu
The following letter was sent by Joe Higgins MEP to the BASSA national office in support of the prospective cabin crew strike against the attacks of British Airways management. Dear Friends, I am writing to express my solidarity, as well as the solidarity of my party an...d our sister party in England and Wales, the Socialist Party, for your campaign to defend your pay and conditions of employment in British Airways. Management’s proposal to axe 1,700 jobs, impose a 2 year wage freeze and to bring in a 2nd tier of ‘yellow pack’ jobs must be robustly opposed. It is clearly an attempt to impose Ryanair style pay and conditions on the staff of BA. I also condemn the extremely confrontational approach from BA management in this dispute. Willie Walsh, fresh from savaging the pay and conditions of Aer Lingus workers in his previous job clearly wants to repeat the same again in BA. It is important for all workers in aviation that a stand is taken. I commend your decision to vote for strike action over the Christmas period. Such a decision is an important stand against the ‘race to the bottom’ in pay and conditions for workers in the aviation industry. I also condemn the vicious campaign in the media against you over the last number of days. The millionaire owned press, who themselves wish to attack the conditions of their own workers cannot be trusted to be impartial when it comes to workers’ struggles. If I or the Socialist Party can be of any practical or political assistance during your struggle please don’t hesitate to get in contact. In solidarity, Joe Higgins MEP
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Joe Higgins
has written a letter of support for British Airways cabin crew, sent to the BASSA national office in support of the prospective cabin crew strike against the attacks of British Airways management.
Read it at link below.
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www.joehiggins.eu
Joe Higgins
has written a letter of support for British Airways cabin crew, sent to the BASSA national office in support of the prospective cabin crew strike against the attacks of British Airways management.
Read it at link below.
www.joehiggins.eu
New story from Joe Higgins.eu
What a damning indictment of yesterday’s Budget that alcohol was the only stimulus featuring significantly in Finance Minister Lenihan’s economic landscape. A cut in the tax on alcohol that is. Perhaps the Minister believes that the low paid, the poor a...nd the unemployed, whose living standards he has brutally lacerated, will go and drown their anger and economic pain in slightly lower priced booze instead of fighting back and organising to kick his government out of office. ‘The worst is over’, proclaimed the Minister as he delivered Budget 2010. Then he went on to inflict the most savage cuts ever on the living standards of low to middle income public sector workers and the unemployed while hitting all working people with tax on fuel and cuts in child benefit. ‘We must stabilise the Budget deficit,’ he also said, ‘but we are doing it in a fair way.’ That was another blatant lie. The whole thrust of the measures announced is to fall on the shoulders of workers and social welfare recipients. There was a ruse to pretend that the Government was also attacking the rich by a minor imposition on multimillionaire tax exiles. But with brazen arrogance, Minister Lenihan stated baldly in the course of his speech that the 12.5% tax on corporate profits would not change and was here to stay. In this the Government showed that it is primarily a servant of big business. Of 39 countries in the continent of Europe, only four have lower corporate tax rates than Ireland – Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Cyprus. Sweden’s rate is double Ireland’s while Belgium’s is almost three times greater. If Ireland had a similar corporate tax rate as Sweden, it would have brought in an extra €6 billion extra in tax on profits last year. But the cuts and extra tax inflicted mainly on working people and the poor yesterday amount to €4billion. That is a deliberate political decision of a right wing government. The attack on the level of unemployment payments is reprehensible. It amounts to a blatant discrimination against young workers whose payments are to be halved. But the cut of €70 per week for an unemployed person of any age who refuses a job offer is a charter for slave conditions. It is designed to force workers to accept jobs on miserable wages as part of the strategy to cut wages right across the board. Workers, public and private, need to unite to mount a massive campaign of opposition to this savage attack, kick this Government out and open a discussion on a fundamental and radical alternative way of organising our society in contrast to this broken, capitalist system.
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Joe Higgins has written his response to the brutal budget. Check it out at the link.
www.joehiggins.eu
Joe Higgins Coverage of the Socialist Party on yesterdays anti-budget protests.
www.independent.ie
SOCIALIST MEP Joe Higgins yesterday called for a 48-hour strike by public sector workers to help
Joe Higgins
Article from a couple of days ago:
€600 million to be spent on domestic water meters
Today’s report that the Government has approved spending €600 million on the installation of domestic water meters in every home in the country shows the utter hypocrisy in their approach to water supply and water charges. The clear inte...ntion is to lash another punitive tax on working people.
www.joehiggins.eu
New story from Joe Higgins.eu
The Budget will, if the Government gets its way, mark the first of four where working people, the unemployed and those who depend on public services will be crucified over an economic crash they did not cause. The palpable anger this is causing in society generally can ...be seen in the threat by the Garda Representative Association to ballot for industrial action. The national day of strike action of public service unions on 24 November could have marked the beginning of a serious fightback which, had it been further escalated and broadened out into a protest movement involving all working people and the unemployed, could have forced a serious retreat by this hated government or even have brought it down. Instead, before the day of strike action had even ended, Peter McLoone, general secretary of IMPACT and Chair of the Public Services Committee of ICTU conceded, as does the Labour Party, that cuts of €1.3billion in the public service pay bill are necessary. Then having given this massive ground they thought they could mitigate the anger of rank and file union members by offering up these cuts in the form of unpaid leave. I and the Socialist Party do not accept the premise of the cuts and unlike the ICTU leadership and the Labour Party are prepared to argue for an economic and political alternative. A quick examination of the Gross Domestic Product statistics, freely available from the Central Statistics Offices, makes clear that the line of the political establishment, right wing economists and media that there are ‘no pots of gold’ to tax is far from the case. In 2008, the effective rate of tax on profits (including that declared by the self employed) amounted to a miniscule 10.3% (approximately €6 billion tax out of €58 billion profits). The corresponding figure for wages including PRSI is 28% (€22 billion tax out of €79 billion in PAYE wages). If profits in 2008 were taxed at the same effective rate as wages, a rate that would still be less than the US and the rest of the EU 15, an extra €10 billion would have been available to the exchequer. Ireland’s economy as a whole is taxed at 34% of GDP when one factors in all sources of revenue including VAT etc. The corresponding figure for other developed economies is typically 45%. The discrepancy between Ireland and the other countries can in the main be attributed to the tax cuts in the areas profits, rent, dividends, capital gains and inheritance. None of these facts ever feature in the big business owned media. Instead we have had a fifteen month campaign of disgusting vilification of public sector workers. This is designed to steer the focus away from the cabal of speculators, developers, big bankers and establishment politicians who are responsible for the crash, and to sort out the Exchequer crisis by making workers pay. The policy of slash and burn will cause thousands of more job losses in the economy. However, the Government doesn’t care about this as its perspective is that the recovery of capitalism in Ireland will come largely from exports. Their objective therefore is to further prostrate Irish society at the feet of the multinationals via low pay and low tax on profits and hope for a rerun of the Celtic Tiger. The government of Macedonia is currently running an ad on business TV channels like Bloomberg, encouraging foreign direct investment on the basis that its corporation tax is 0% and the average monthly wage is €430! This is a race to the bottom that cannot be won by Ireland. We counterpose the democratic harnessing of the wealth alluded to above, for the benefit of society rather than corporate super profit. We demand, not massive bailouts of banks and developers, but nationalisation of the banks under democratic control and the funding of a massive programme of necessary public infrastructural projects which would put tens of thousands back to work. We seek publicly owned, and democratically run, new state enterprises such as an Oil and Gas Prospecting and Recovery Agency to use our natural resources for society rather than handing it to companies like Shell Oil. Trade union leaders have long lost sight of their core role which is to defend their members’ pay and conditions. They had no mandate to propose pay cuts of 4.6% in the form of unpaid leave. It was shameful that they trade union called off the second day of action scheduled for 3rd December in return for another fruitless discussion which the government guillotined last Friday. ICTU leaders have demonstrated themselves utterly incapable of arguing a radical alternative to the cuts that would give confidence to workers in the public and private sectors and to the unemployed to fight for a decent society to replace this failing capitalist system. Furthermore, one has to question whether the current top leadership is really capable of an empathy with ordinary people given the massive salaries they receive that put them materially closer to government and employers than their own members. The membership need to reclaim their trade unions as fighting organisations to defend workers whether unemployed or working, public or private sector. This means a new leadership democratically accountable and living on the same wages as the ordinary members they represent. A determined forty eight hour strike action in the public sector, linked to an appeal to all workers to support the principle that working people must not pay for the crisis, would be the beginning of a real fightback to stop the cuts and force a change in policy. That this could bring down the Government would be an extra gain making possible a serious discussion of the need for a serious political alternative for working people. I would encourage workers and social welfare recipients to come to the Dáil on Budget Day, this Wednesday, at 1pm and demonstrate against this Budget.
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Joe Higgins has written a pre-budget analysis. Check it out. Protests going on all day today at the Dail so get down here whenever you can.
socialistparty.net
The Budget will, if the Government gets its way, mark the first of four where working people, the unemployed and those who depend on public services will be crucified over an economic crash they did not cause. ...
Joe Higgins invites any supporters in Limerick to come along to the public meeting tomorrow providing a socialist response to the brutal budget.
Location:Upstairs, Magners Bar, Roches St., LIMERICK
Time:8:00PM Wednesday, December 9th
Joe Higgins
Watch the full video from today's press conference, or read the press release now on Joe's site
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At a Press Conference in Dublin today, Joe Higgins, Socialist Party MEP and senior trade union activists called for all out resistance to the plan by the Fianna Fáil/Green Party government to savage the wages of public service workers
www.joehiggins.eu
New story from Joe Higgins.eu
We now have a right wing National Government in all but name as Fine Gael and the Labour Party gang up with Fianna Fail and the Green Party to hammer the wages of low and middle income public sector workers. With breathtaking arrogance, all the establishment parties in ...the Dail have now shifted the burden of the economic crash onto the shoulders of workers while the authors of the crisis slip quietly away or are bailed out. Fine Gael has been exposed as the twin of Fianna Fail in its reactionary proposal to slash wages over the low threshold of €30,000 per year and take the hatchet to 10,000 jobs. The Labour noises over the last year trying to pretend to be a voice for workers, have been exposed as cynical posturing as it actually wants to up the ante on cuts. The entire political establishment is totally united in cynically making working people and the poor pay for this crisis of capitalism. Workers should revolt Workers in the public service should not lie down in front of the attack on their living standards nor be cowed by the vicious media onslaught over the past year scapegoating them for the crisis. Workers in the private sector need to take heed of the ruthless treatment of public workers because they will face further attacks on their living standards also. What is crucial to know is that the policy of slashing wages will only make the economic crisis worse by cutting demand for goods and services in society thus giving rise to further thousands of private sector workers being thrown onto the dole. It must also be remembered that the current proposals are only the first in a series of four years of equally savage cuts. The official trade union leadership has totally capitulated to the demands that workers must pay for the crisis through pay cuts for private and public sector workers, slashing of public services and job cuts. Trade union members need to repudiate this betrayal and organise at rank and file level to mobilise themselves and resist present and future attacks.
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