IT didn’t take long.
It never does.
We had a long time of boom and we are only really just in to bust but the underlying philosophy of power comes to the surface quite quickly.
The Irish Government has just announced that current proposals on the table include one whereby if you are on the dole your payments will be cut if you turn down the offer of ‘suitable’ employment.
This recession might be new territory for new Ireland but we are on old territory here, we are back to a recurring philosophy. The poor are to blame for being poor.
It all ties in very nicely with an attitude that was increasingly apparent during the Celtic Tiger years.
This was the idea, one that has gained an awful lot of traction during the recession, that workers should be ‘flexible’ with regards to employment.
This is not quite the flexibility that is embodied in the likes of the public service whereby people can negotiate their shifts and work patterns. Indeed, that kind of flexibility, embodied as it is in secure working conditions, is a complete anathema to those who mean something else by the term all together.
What is meant by this kind of flexibility would be something known by a whole generation of Irish people, especially those who emigrated to Britain in the 1950s to work in the building trade.
They would have known all about flexibility in the workplace. They would have known that this flexibility meant that wages and working conditions were deeply flexible.
Indeed, they would have known that employment itself was flexible and, that like the wages and the conditions, was often at the whim of a particular subbie or a particular foreman.
Flexible working conditions could often mean being told in the van coming home or in the pub that evening, that we don’t need you tomorrow.
In essence, this kind of flexibility means being at the mercy of individual like or dislike, being there one day and not the next merely because someone says so.
That is the nature of flexibility in the workplace.
Indeed, ideally, for those to whom unions, negotiated wages and progressive working conditions are the enemy of competitiveness and progress a flexible workforce, one that you could just replace overnight if someone else would do it cheaper or do it more at your beck and call, is the ultimate.
I would imagine it is the kind of thing David Cameron dreams about. An entire workforce of casual employees.
His dream is shared here.
Which, of course, ties in very nicely with the idea of ‘clamping down’ on people receiving dole, for if your workforce has little rights, is flexible, what rights can those without employment expect?
In that way you can see a country, brought to its financial knees by the criminal activities of an elite, turning upon those with least. Blaming the poor.
And who, might we ask, decides what is meant by this ‘suitable’ employment that you might be offered?
Would it be like the man in his 50s I heard of recently who was offered a job as a pizza delivery boy because he had a small works van?
Is that suitable employment?
And is it not the case that these kind of policies always rear their head just when there are in fact fewer jobs?
Just when the chances of actually finding ‘suitable’ employment are greatly diminished.
The latest figure here in Ireland stated that 439,100 people were seeking jobseekers allowance, which compared with the total population of Ireland is a huge number.
Are we to believe then that despite this, despite these figures and despite all visible evidence, that there are in fact thousands and thousands of ‘suitable’ jobs out there that noone has yet found?
Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern prided themselves on being free of ideology and Brian Cowen’s Fianna Fáil is indeed the ultimate catch-all party, free of any consistent principle.
David Cameron is of this breed too; those politicians who like to position themselves as being above politics. None of it is true.
All of the above were, and are, deeply political. And what is that politics?
What is that ideology, an ideology ironically shared by British Conservatives and Irish republicans?
It is an ideology those on the dole may well be about to experience. And after them, who is next? Are you ready to be flexible?