Sometimes, it’s the little things that get up your wick. The Sunday Business Post produced one of those little calculations to suggest how expensive it is, how draining on our pockets it is, to increase public sector pay:
‘Each 1 per cent rise in the public pay bill costs the government almost €200 million.’
Geez, that [...]

 
Our man from Ongar, Leo Varadkar, TD, is in madness mode. At a debate on the Future of Social Partnership at the Young Fine Gael Summer School he demanded:
‘ . . . a moderate pay deal that taxpayers can afford. . . This must include major concessions by the unions on business competition.’
Now, [...]

Friday morning and I’m looking forward to the weekend and hopefully catching a few rays.  A friend, however, sends me a copy of the Goodbody report - the most pessimistic forecast yet.  It’s already raining.Goodbody predicts the economy will decline by 2.2 per cent this year but the good news is that next year, [...]

ICTU is playing some hardball. Recently, David Begg suggested that inflation could go as high as 6.5 per cent. He’s probably not far off the mark. Today’s CSO’s figures show inflation running at 5 per cent - up a half a per cent since last month Even the European HICP [...]

Lunchtime
No matter what point in the economic cycle a country is in, the science of history gets a battering. But in recession times, history is just simply invented.
Take Professor Mary Harney, TD, on Question & Answers the other night. She treated us to a yellow-note lecture on . . well . [...]

In the current economic climate it’s hard to know what is more depressing: the fact of economic recession, the onslaught of the Right through all the channels at their disposal, the unsettling quiescence of the Left, or the besieging of the trade union movement. It’s all coming down the pipe so fast [...]

Sometimes a proposal comes along that is so simple you say to yourself, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ That’s what I said when reading ICTU’s ‘Economic Outlook: Narrowing the Pay Gap’. The highlight of this comprehensive review of the economy is its discussion of the growing pay gap between the upper echelons of [...]

That ol’ red herring - Labour’s links with trade unions - is raising its head again. Kevin Rafter suggests the Party’s 21st Century Commission (an internal review body) should:
‘ . . . look at Labour’s relationship with the trade union movement.’
Mr. Rafter likens this relationship to that which the State used to have with religious [...]

The new union UNITE (the merged ATGWU and AMICUS unions) has just published a report on Irish wages that is sure to prove controversial. It flatly contradicts the prevailing consensus that Irish wages are somehow ‘high’, that Irish wage growth is high relative to our EU trading partners, and that these ‘high’ wages are [...]