Low pay loving bosses to urge us to Vote Yes!

national | miscellaneous | news report

Tuesday October 01, 2002 16:23

by Libertarians Against Nice

The SFA are to be congratulated for letting the cat out of the bag by coupling whinging about a desultory increase in the minimum wage with calling for a Yes vote for Nice.

Press Release - Oct/01/2002 - No embargo
From: Libertarians Against Nice
Low pay loving bosses to urge us to Vote Yes!

Low pay loving bosses to urge us to Vote Yes!

The Nice campaign has seen a stream of the rich and powerful telling us to vote yes or suffer the economic consequences. They look forward to the profits that will come to them because of the privatisation agenda found in the changes to Article 133 of the Nice Treaty. The weakness of their argument has been that their profits will be based on Irish and European workers losses.

On Wednesday this argument becomes farcical when the Small Firms Association comes out for a Yes vote at their AGM (SFA AGM, Burlington hotel, Wednesday 2 October). This is the same SFA who on the 23rd September* were whinging about the desultory increase in the minimum wage! And this because they said "domestic wage increases are three times the level of other eurozone economies"

Andrew Flood of Libertarians Against Nice said
"The SFA are to be congratulated for letting the cat out of the bag by coupling whinging about a desultory increase in the minimum wage with calling for a Yes vote for Nice. This makes it clear to Irish workers that the Nice treaty may be good for the economic interests of the business owners but it will be bad for those of us who have to work for them. For workers the privatisation resulting from the Nice treaty will mean loss of pay and conditions if not loss of employment for those employed in the targeted sectors. For workers outside of these it will mean both a loss in the quality of service and increased charges for services."

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Libertarians Against Nice
http://more.at/stopnice
contactLAN@yahoogroups.com
LAN, c/o PO Box 178, Cork

More information on the Nice privatisation agenda at
http://struggle.ws/ireland/nice/analysis/corporate.html

* See SFA Press Release
"SFA issues dire warning on job prospects. Prospects for new jobs in small firms bleak"
Release Date: 23/09/2002, Name: Pat Delaney, SFA Director, Email: patrick.delaney@ibec.ie, specifically
"The pending increase in the National Minimum Wage which places Ireland at least 21% ahead of competitor economies will severely impact on the creation of part-time work"
and
"Wage rates are now outstripping productivity growth for the first time in six years and domestic wage increases are three times the level of other eurozone economies."