Irish Strike Over Cut-Rate Wages of Foreigners
More than 70,000 labor union members brought Irish cities to a standstill Friday to protest a plan to replace ferry workers with low-paid Eastern Europeans -- the most bitter industrial showdown Ireland has suffered in decades.
More than 40,000 trade unionists and their supporters marched down Dublin’s main thoroughfare to the parliament building behind a banner that read, “Equal Rights for All Workers.” They waved flags, banged drums, blew whistles, sang 1960s protest songs and held up placards that read, “No slave ships on Irish seas,” and, “Ferry Christmas, Mr. Scrooge.”
The company Irish Ferries two weeks ago began introducing new laborers -- mostly from Latvia -- working for $4.25 an hour, less than half of Ireland’s minimum wage.
“There is a threshold of decency below which the Irish people will not accept anyone being dragged, no matter where they come from,” David Begg, secretary-general of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, told the crowd in Dublin Friday.
Begg said protesters weren’t hostile to immigration, which has soared; they merely want to stop “the suppression of wage rates in this country.”
Irish Ferries insists it’s legal for an international shipping company to ignore Ireland’s minimum wage and has applied to register its vessels in Cyprus.
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