“Hardworking civil servants have kept many essential services functioning throughout the pandemic. Many are key workers. We share their disappointment and frustration at Sinn Féin Minister for Finance Conor Murphy’s decision to refuse the request from NIPSA to reinstate pay lost during strike action.
Penalising strike action to improve terms and conditions has long been a vicious tool used unscrupulously to undermine workers rights and trade unions. Going back to the 1913 Dublin Lockout it has been used to starve workers into submission. Civil servants and health service workers were forced to take strike action after years of derogatory pay freezes and cuts imposed by the Stormont Executive.
Nurses and health service workers had their pay reinstated following public outrage that they would be penalised for courageously taking strike action for better pay, to increase staffing levels and to save the health service following year on year attacks. In his response to NIPSA Murphy says the ‘circumstances for health workers and unique and exception’ – this is the politics of divide and conquer coming from the top. The reality is that the Stormont Executive was embarrassed into restoring health service workers pay.
The demand of civil servants is no different from health service workers. Murphy’s decision makes a mockery of commitments to workers rights in the New Decade, New Approach. The minister plays up the meagre 2% increase civil servants received but there’s no acknowledgement that those with decision-making powers were responsible for unjustly prolonging the strike. The dispute could and should have been resolved at a much earlier date. This only compounds the injustice. Murphy should reverse his decision.
Platitudes aside, the political establishment here doesn’t see equality for workers as a central objective. It’s something they are forced to respond to when workers take action or when there’s public outrage. The role of workers during the pandemic has underscored their central importance to society but also the way so many have been devalued. The demand for workers rights brings people from all backgrounds and communities together. This solidarity is going to become all the more important in the weeks and months ahead.”
