Irish public march against ‘cheap’ immigrant labour

http://www.viploan.co.uk/article/General-1774.shtml

DUBLIN: Streets in the capital and other cities of Ireland were yesterday overflowing with people marching to protest against Irish Ferries’ plan to replace its workers with low-paid immigrants.

A total of over 70,000 labour union members and their supporters brought Irish cities and towns to a standstill carrying placards, beating drums and singing protest songs. The banners and placards carried various messages like “Equal Rights For All Workers”, “No slave ships on Irish seas” and “Stop Outsourcing” referring to the growing incidence of natives being replaced by immigrants willing to work for low wages.

In Dublin, a large mass of 40,000 people marched to the parliament. The rally was organized after talks between unions and employers led to nowhere.

Earlier this year, the company had tried to tempt its 543 unionised workers (one third its workforce) with redundancy payoffs worth £16.8 million. The unions were provoked after Irish Ferries began hiring immigrant labour a fortnight ago...

Strange, isn't it?

Replacing one set of workers with another that will work for less does result in the first set of workers losing their jobs. (And, of course, the threat of bringing in cheaper labor is a great way to keep employees from getting uppity and expecting a living wage.) This is simple. If you doubt it, consider what has happened to meatpacking workers since the 1980s.

Could it be that outsourcing is when we send thom litle's job TO another country after we fire him/her and

Immigration is when we fire Thom Little and bring somebody INTO the country to take his place?

Msongs
www.msongs.com/chinamart.htm

...unemployment would be worst in the places that have the highest immigrant populations. That's not the case. It's worst in places where old-line industries have been shutting down and leaving the country.

compare it to the rest of europe. the irish really lack that imperialist better than thou attitude found in britain, that's for sure. their immigrants are not from their colonies, and all that implies, as is the case in so many european countries. but a major move to shit can workers like this is naturally going to provoke a reaction. it is about a reduced standard of living for everyone.
knowing what i do about the irish, i'd say it's 95% about economics.

has lost the Democratic Party the working man's vote. Democrats should be leading the march against cheap immigrant labor.

It will continue to happen as long there are people from 3rd world nations who are willing to work for peanuts.

I wonder, is there any solution to this problem? Or, are we all going to be forced to live a 3rd world standard of living someday.

The most pragmatic solution is a labor movement that is truly worldwide in scope. Labor unions are often limited by national boundaries, but that's not the case with multinational corporations that can skip across continents with little trouble. If they don't like a nation's labor laws, then they will move to one with no laws. If one considers all workers of the world as one entity, then what capitalists, the big shareholders, who own the corporations are doing is pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom, and the capitalists win, and the workers lose.

Here I thought I was the only one who thought this way Jamison.

Ever lived in a third world nation? It isn't fun to watch desperate people struggle to survive. I definitely don't want to become a citizen of a third world nation because we sit around and let our government give our country away.

She will not go back in , willingly..

The capital interests of western civilization have entered a period which sees the strangling of labor as a force of good.

There is no point in ownership over resources and the means of production if one who controls all that cannot make a profit. Sure, he's making a profit without the outsourcing. It's just that he demands even greater profits on top of that, and that requires that one cut costs, including labor costs. If Mr. CEO does not demand it, then the shareholders who voted him in will demand it, and they will replace him with someone who will.

If a market had only a few employers and several dozen workers, things will strike a natural balance between workers and their employers. However, if even one of those employers looks elsewhere for cheap labor far below the cost of indigenous workers, every other employer is forced to do the same just to prevent being driven out of the market by a competitor with impossibly low labor costs.

If they don't, then the employer who first began outsourcing will try to win their market share because he now has more money to invest in expansion at the expense of his competitors, and once his competitors are driven into the ground, he will jack up prices again to make back all the money he spent defeating his competitors, and he will become a virtual monopoly. This assumes that anti-trust laws, if they exist, are not enforced.

this is how you get the political structure and the corporat structure to pay attention.

but governments WILL have to legislate outsourcing and cheap labour coming in to the country{by and large i don't believe immigrant labour has a big influence on the labour economy} and post industrialized countries will have to renegotiate their treaties with cheap labour countries.