Cut people’s dole to reduce unemployment - did the people who write these OECD policy prescriptions learn their craft at Krusty’s Clown College? Of course, we’ve run into some curious analysis from the OECD before - especially their argument that Ireland’s housing boom was ok, it was just a product of demographic [...]

Michael Taft was on Primetime tonight talking about the JLC proposals. You can see a recording of the program here.
The proposal by the Minister for Enterprise, Richard Bruton - as mooted in the Irish Times report - is cynical in the extreme. Apparently, he wants to remove the ability of employers [...]

The Restaurant Association of Ireland and Ibec won’t like it. Fine Gael certainly won’t like it. The army of commentators armed only with superficial and out-of-date analysis won’t like it. But the report on the Joint Labour Councils written by Kevin Duffy and Dr Frank Walsh does a good job [...]

The Government has got itself into a bit of bother over this whole pension levy lark. But the complaints from the pension industry are a bit hard to take. In this regard, contributions from two leading pension experts - Gerry Hughes and Jim Stewart - are worth noting. [...]

The front page story on the Sunday Independent really says it all. Apparently, the Labour Court has awarded a pay increase to Bord na Mona workers. The Sindo no like. How dare workers get a pay increase? And in this dislike they make some claims which show how dumb [...]

At the heart of the Government’s emerging policy lies a profound dislocation and contradiction. Its Jobs Initiative is intended to promote consumer spending - a valid enough goal. Consumer spending has collapsed (by 10 percent) in comparison with the Eurozone average (less than 1 percent). Of course, consumer spending is [...]

On the eve of the Government’s job initiative Fianna Fail’s Michael Martin put it starkly:
‘Government’s don’t create jobs.’
This is straight from the kindergarten school of economics. Governments create jobs all the time. Let’s draw up a list.
1. The Government directly employs approximately 300,000 people in public services and administration: nurses, teachers, [...]

When publishing its submission to the Government in anticipation of the Jobs Initiative, IBEC’s Danny McCoy stated:
‘Business will provide the job opportunities that the country so desperately needs, but Government must ensure the conditions are right.’
This comes straight from the climatology school of enterprise development - the Government gets the ‘business climate’ right (low [...]

TASC did something quite unusual, even revolutionary: they looked up the facts. With all the unsubstantiated claims about labour costs, ‘Myths of the Irish Crisis: Wages and Competitiveness‘ is truly fresh air in a stale debate.  Here I reproduce the data from Eurostat which TASC uses to show that Irish labour costs in low-paid sectors [...]

I’m usually not partial to terms like ‘class war’ but readers might be able to provide an alternative description to what is happening.
First, we find that AIB employees were informed over the airwaves that there would be 2,000 redundancies plus with no guarantee that it will all be voluntary. A spokesperson from SIPTU - which [...]