Wednesday, Mar 17th 2010
175 Boston Scientific jobs to go in Galway, the loss of 200 Bitech Engineering jobs in Louth,a seismic 750 job lost at Halifax, those depressing numbers that Ronan Lyons has pulled up - what are we to make of the state of the labour market only a few weeks into the new year?
Hard to get [...]
Sometimes, something happens that takes your breath away. The chain store Boots is engaged in a deplorable assault on their employees’ wages and working conditions - employees who are some of the lowest paid in the economy. Not only that, it constitutes an assault upon other enterprises, the Exchequer and the Irish economy.
Let’s do some [...]
Joe Higgins.eu | Aer Lingus: After Lisbon the Job Massacre Continues
Yesterday, Joe Higgins raised the issue of planned job cuts at Aer Lingus at the European Parliament, making it clear that the Irish government asked the comany to delay the announcement of these savage attacks until after the Lisbon referendum. This underlines the [...]
What kind of recession are we having - or rather, how is it impacting on different sectors of the labour force? Some time ago we heard talk of a middle-class recession - how particular ‘middle class’ occupations were being badly affected. Architects were one such profession and clearly there’s not much use for this group [...]
The Irish Times can claim it is stimulating debate on important issues. After all, didn’t one of their columnists provoke debate on the ‘generosity’ or otherwise of our social welfare system? And isn’t that same columnist provoking a debate on job subsidies? What I find curious is the mode of provocation: rather than investigation, examination [...]
Tony Judt, writing in 2006 used the phrase ‘useful idiots’ to describe a new cohort of American liberals who were happy to use their considerable intellectual reputations to endorse the morally repugnant actions of the US Administration in the Middle East. The phrase came to mind, perhaps uncharitably, while reading Sli Eile’s response in the [...]
There is a sense that, if we could just overcome these temporary setbacks (recession, credit crunch, low export demand) then we might find our way back to a more benign economic climate. There’s very little sense that this is a ‘game-changer’, as Liam, a reader of this blog, put it. For instance, the Sunday Tribune [...]
I had intended to treat each of the offerings in the Irish Times ‘What is to be Done’ series individually, hoping that they would provide us with new, innovative ideas. Boy, did I call that wrong. Jobs are being lost, enterprises are closing, our GDP is contracting, confidence is being lost - and all we [...]