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Bosses want to privatise buses and trains
 national |
environment |
opinion/analysis
 Thursday July 31, 2003 13:11 by Workers Solidarity
= more profits for the bosses
= traffic jams, pollution and crap service for travellers
= worse pay and conditions for workers The FF/PD coalition are pushing ahead with plans to privatise buses and trains. Should we worry, does it matter who the boss is? Bus and train workers know what's at stake. The vote for industrial action over the summer was 83.2% in Irish Rail, 87.9% in Bus Eireann, and 90.6% in Dublin Bus.
We have a poor public transport service because it is not really intended to be a service. It's not there for our convenience. Its primary goal is to get us into work and into town to spend our money in the shops. When the private transport firms were taken over and merged into CIE it was because they could not even do that.
Years of underinvestment in CIE brought it close to bankruptcy by the mid-1990s. The government subsidy (much of it to fund less used but necessary routes) had dropped from £24 million down to £5.6 million. Only in recent years has the subsidy been rising again, but it is still a long way behind most European countries. The average is 50%, in Ireland it is a mere 11%. Despite all this, and thanks to lots of changes agreed by bus workers, Dublin Bus made a profit of €3.4 million last year.
NBRU and SIPTU workers refused to collect fares on July 18th. This was a great way to hit the government in the pocket without inconveniencing the rest of us. According to Metroline chief executive, David O'Farrell, "a promise of free fare days and one day strikes is not what the public wants". Well he was wrong about that!
Full support for the bus and train workers is in all our interests. We don't need privatisation - we do need a free public transport service, operated for passengers and run by the people with the best knowledge, the transport workers themselves.
The consequences of transport privatisation
There is nothing wrong or "inefficient" in subsiding public transport. It's a lot cheaper to provide regular, dependable and affordable (or free!) buses and trains than to have even more car usage. More cars on the road means more road building, more road repairs, more traffic jams and more air pollution.
Transport Minister Seamus Brennan now intends to sell off 25% of Dublin Bus routes from January, and another 25% each year after that. Waiting eagerly is Metroline, a part of the Delgo multinational. They have already bought up Aerdart, City Link and started a Galway to Shannon route.
They are an anti-union firm who have shown their true colours in Glasgow and Edinburgh where they have made working conditions worse than before and cut back the actual bus service. Afterall, their only interest is in making as much profit as possible.
The private companies will seek to underbid Dublin Bus and Bus Eireann for the routes by employing non-unionised workers on fixed term contracts, with lower pay and little in the way of pension or other benefits.
After an initial honeymoon period the less profitable services will be cut back. To expect anything else is to expect that greedy fat cat capitalists will suddenly decide to put our needs before their wealth. Some chance!
More at
http://struggle.ws/wsm/environment.html
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Comments (11 of 11)
Jump To Comment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11As I said back when the SWP were doing it :), since the whole paper is one the web now, you should post the index page with the summaries and links to the individual articles, rather than posting them all up one by one.
You apostate!
Even though I'm not an anarchist, the WSM are alright. SWP on the other hand...
As an experiment I'm posting the articles that are Irish news that has not received much coverage on indymedia here. I'm not posting the more 'what is anarchism' type stuff or the international stuff. I'd reckon a similar selective posting from the other left press would make sense in terms of expanding the range of issues being covered.
The editoral guidelines at http://www.indymedia.ie/about/editorial.php don't really have anything to say one way or another on this. However I recognise these don't reflect all the editoral practise, perhaps it might be an idea to have an expanded set of guidelines for this?
Anyway I'll follow whatever feedback there is on this, so if you have an opinion make it heard.
A kind of digest of links of newly published stuff - such as the one sent out by e-mail about struggle site would be good. IMC in my humble personal opinion should be an collection point and outlet for as much good Irish originated politically inclined journalism and opinion as possible.
It would be good to see digests of newly published stuff from Voice / SWP Paper / An Phoblacht / The Blanket etc etc appearing here on the wire and whether or not they do at present - the ed guidelines should accomodate this.
Interesting and detailed debates (as opposed to debates wrecked by our resident tourettes inflicted trolls) which flesh out such articles and give a range of points of view on the contents have a habit of appearing here which is good. Links - when stuff is already published are preferable to cut and paste jobs though.
It means that an extra effort has to be made by the publisher to communicate why this is a topic of interest to the wider audience that might never go near their in-house journal.
It makes it clear that this is material published at another source (the WSM website) which means that those with an allergy to the WSM can avoid it, and those that don't have any feelings about the group but are interested in the topic are directed to the horse's mouth.
Everyone wins.
"Even though I'm not an anarchist, the WSM are alright. SWP on the other hand..."
Says it all really doesn't it.
Socialists bad, anarchists good.
The article itself is quite good. Does anyone know if CIE are definatley going to dock the workers' pay for the free-fare-all day? Btw, free fares are fucking sweet. Did anyone else notice how much quicker busses went cos people didn't have to line up with cars/money? Now if we could only get proper bus lanes eh?
Also, can anyone tell me what exactly happened in Harcourt St yesterday? I kept missing the news.
Finally, if it's allowed by the guidelines, I will post up summaries and links etc anytime the Voice goes online. I think it would be good if all the groups did this. And someone can post up all the best articles from the Weekly Worker!
Current voice can be read at
http://www.socialistparty.net/pub/pages/avoiceindex.htm
I still haven't found a reliable publication to update ye all on the O.W.F.G.R.C. from the L.A.C.G.C. but as soon as I do, I shall link as well.
should say -*cards/money*- not cars/money
We had a debate about this, oh, about six months back, maybe more. What we don't want are simple announcements that X paper is for sale, because that's just an advertisement. Nor do we want each of the articles from a paper to be posted up one after another, each as a separate article. But a digest of the contents of each issue as it is published, with links to the full stories, would be good. That goes equally for Workers Solidarity, The Voice, Socialist Worker, Red Banner, APRN, and anything else I've left off.
As far as I'm concerned, this doesn't apply to the Weekly Worker, since its a British paper, that covers events in Britain, not Ireland. A weekly digest of the WW would be as unwelcome as a weekly digest of the British Socialist Worker, the American Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, whatever the Australian DSM's paper is, etc, etc, etc. The place for a Weekly Worker digest is indymedia uk, not IMC Ireland.
Also, I did say I'd put up summaries and links, not whole articles