That our healthcare system is a source of fright for many isn’t anything new. it’s a dreaded rites of passage nearly to be left propped up on a trolley in a corridor as the numbers stuck waiting for bed reach an all-time high. Paul Dillon talks to the people that have turned tracking trolleys into one of the main statistical tropes of the crisis in our healthcare system about why … Read More
Hold The Line.
Author Enda Brophy has spent the past decade researching call centres. His book Language Put To Work chronicles how the industry has transformed the world of communications and looks at how workers fight back within it. Paul Dillon took his call.
The Language Of Exploitation.
Above: The statue of James Joyce on Talbot St. He was a language teacher too, and certainly showed what could be done with it. Unite the Union are making handy use of this factoid in their memes ahead of the protest tomorrow. Picture sourced from the Wiki Commons. Every summer Dublin’s streets are chock-a-block with language students. It’s a booming industry but remains largely unregulated with scumbag employer tactics like zero … Read More
Dun Talkin.
The reality music of Jinx Lennon shows us that we can engage with everyday life and not go under. Influenced as much by post punk and hip hop the Dundalk man is a different breed of singer songwriter altogether. He released two albums in 2016 after a six year break. We packed Martin Leen off up to Dundalk for a chat with the lad. So there has been a long … Read More
You Have Been Allocated.
Above: The cover illustration that accompanied the print version of this piece from #rabble13 by Brian Burke. A feeling of being put through the ringer, harassed into dampening employment expectations and rightly pissed off that private companies have access to their data – that’s the general picture emerging from a survey carried out by rabble into various labour activation schemes including Job Path. Rashers Tierney gives us the lowdown … Read More
Hail To The Bus Driver.
Daycent stuff from the crew at SIPTU Digital giving an insight into the slow chipping away at terms and conditions and hammering rural routes. With an all out transport strike brewing – it’s worth listening to the voices of transport workers as an antidote to the inevitable bar-stool George Hooks that’ll be moaning in your ear come three points in or the absolutely pond life level of humour that … Read More
#Disrupting Big-Tech.
Video from @UVWunion yesterday. @Deliveroo workers only willing to negotiate collectively not individually. pic.twitter.com/ZSLvThYNhb — Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) August 12, 2016 Crowdfunder to support the striking Deliveroo drivers, please donate and share if you can! @IWGB_CLB https://t.co/5nJfwewoeq — Matt Turner (@MattTurner4L) August 12, 2016 Deliveroo drivers and riders in London will be now striking for the third consecutive evening. The strike is in relation to a move by Deliveroo to … Read More
Stop the Trams!
While Luas Cross City work continues apace in Dublin, there was a noticeable absence of Luas trams at times. The just settled industrial dispute between tram drivers and their employer grew proper bitter at times, yet as Donal Fallon finds it’s certainly not the first major strike involving Dublin’s tram drivers.
While much has changed in recent decades, some things haven’t – there was nothing new about some of the discourse around the recent Luas dispute, depicting workers as overfed and underworked.
If anything would surprise Dubliners of old about the current dispute, it is perhaps the fact there are tramlines at all. When the last Dublin United Tramways Company route closed in July 1949 (the No.8 to Dalkey, for any pub quiz aficionados) many believed they were waving goodbye to a form of public transport for ever.
In the Sunday Independent, one writer made it clear that “I am sorry for the demise of the trams, but as a motorist I just cannot weep for them. They had become an incorrigible block to modern traffic, holding always, as they did, the middle of the road…Yet, the trams are dead, and it is time for them to lie down.” By the 1940s, the tram seemed a relic of the past.
Talking Union.
An incoming event here that should be of interest to those at a loss about how to score victories against the bosses in fragmented and precarious work places. Joe Carolan, him of Globalise Resistance fame a million years ago – and other members of the Unite union from NZ are in town and doing a talk. When we talked to Joe sometime last year he had this to say about … Read More
Pharmaceutical Assistance?
One of our readers got in touch about some shenanigans within the Pharmaceutical Society of Ireland that is going to adversely affect a predominantly female and part-time workforce. Ailbhe Ní Bhroin’s ma is a pharmaceutical assistant and she claims that the PSI is basically trying to force her and her colleagues out of the work force. They want to redefine their qualifications some 30 years after conferring them. We’ll let … Read More