Government Talks Were Just Way To Kill School Secretary and Caretaker Pickets

The news yesterday evening that talks with government had broken down with no progress on pension parity for school secretaries and caretakers will be met by massive frustration and anger all workers involved in the strike.

It is 12 weeks since the strike was called off. The government suggested that it was serious about pension fairness. But the government strategy was really about taking momentum away from a militant campaign by workers that had massive public support.

These workers currently do not have a pension equal to other public sector workers and after long service to our communities will not retire with a fair pension. Fórsa official Andy Pike said yesterday that: “The Department’s refusal to table a constructive proposal on this point has now brought the process to an impasse.”

So there you have it, months later and no plan from the employers side shows they were never serious about a resolution. The government lied to workers to end the strike because there was a real possibility of schools closing with the strike continuing.

Public pressure would have seen the government forced to concede to workers’ demands. But we have to be honest - our union leaders were also happy to end the strike, with SNA’s starting to refuse to cross pickets, they feared losing control of the strike and feared bad publicity.

We will never win if we’re afraid of workers’ solidarity, effective picketing and if we trust the bosses are true to their word.

The union should have stood its ground and been far stronger in continuing to escalate the strike. They had already seen previous broken promises, to work towards pension parity broken after the 2021 secretary strike was called off, yet fell into the government trap.

A promise to work towards a result means nothing to a government which has overseen record child homelessness, and record hospital waiting lists. So now with no progress the talks will move to the Labour Court for a uncertain decision.

This drags out the dispute and it is hard to see a resolution before Christmas. The state’s industrial relations process is designed by the government to frustrate workers power while giving the appearance of fairness.

It is designed to keep strikes in Ireland to a minimum and keep wages low to benefit employers. This has been a massive success for the bosses and for government and the consequence is that real wage growth has stopped completely over the last 30 years.

We are also far behind the rest of the EU when it comes to pensions, sick pay and other benefits – precisely because workers are told from above that we can’t fight for these rights due to our strike laws here.

We should stand behind the school secretaries and caretakers in their struggle for fairness because this could be you next. We need to get involved in our unions to push them to be more militant and to fight back.

We need to build a real fighting working class movement and within that build up a layer of working class socialists who know exactly what the government game is and refuse to play on the government’s terms.