National - Event Notice
Thursday January 01 1970

DCTU Pre-Budget Protest - Saturday 24th November

national | worker & community struggles and protests | event notice

Thursday October 25, 2012 09:48

by SIPTU Community - Communities Against Cuts

Communities Join With DCTU for Anti Austerity Protest

The Dublin Council of Trade Unions is bringing together a broad coalition for this years pre-budget protest on Saturday 24th November, 1pm, Parnell Square, Dublin 1.

Among those mobilising are the SIPTU Community Campaign, Community Against Cuts, The Spectacle of Defiance and Hope, The Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes and the SIPTU Dublin District Committee.

Communities Against Cuts

Ed: Photos of the event can be found here

The Government is going to make choices for Budget 2013 that will affect the community sector. It will choose how much money goes to services such as childcare, youth work and community employment.

Previous budget cuts have brought the Community Sector to breaking point; we have to ensure that this time the Government makes the right choice.

Union activists have spent the past year campaigning and lobbying politicians and telling them why the sector needs to be protected, but now is the time to hit the streets.

On 24th November, 1pm the SIPTU and Communities Against Cuts will be joining the Dublin Council of Trade Union’s pre-budget demonstration at Parnell Square, Dublin.

We are asking all workers and supporters to join us and send a message to Government; cutting communities will mean pain for you.

Attached is a poster that you can put up in your project or give to your colleagues, friends and family.

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Comments (15 of 15)

Because they're NOT worth it

by anti-L'oreal Budgeteer

Thu Oct 25, 2012 15:05

how about cutting public servants over 100K and their bloated pension plans?? (and politicians too)
How about cutting pay of top trade unionists??

It seems to me this is all just lip service. The government have a handy arrangement with PS unions as long as they stick with croke park and protect the well paid public service. (I'm talking those over 50k not the rest here) and since their pay is linked to these, they protect themselves too.

The recent report on TD pay was an eye opener.

The budget will again hammer those without a strong voice on social welfare and any community voluntary services.

Meanwhile Greedy TD's will keep their basic pay of 93k plus extras which can nearly double it up to 180k. All for having absolutely no effect on Dail decisions which are essentially just pushed through by the party whip.

And all that money and all those ineffective TDs just to manage a population comparable to that of greater manchester.

In a recession this is complete lunacy and a guarantee to bring us further into recession more quickly.

Our ponzi pension scheme is bust paying the likes of shell traitor bertie and crook Ray Burke 100K p.a.

We need to cut where it is deserved and stop haemmoraging huge amounts of money to unsecured foreign banksters and speculators who we don't owe anything to.

increase tax on foreign tax dodging corporations who set up shop here.

They pay fuck all tax and employ fuck all people to create their tax write off operations here.

And We need to stop talking about GDP because their money laundering operations obscure the real state of our economy shown more clearly by the downward spiralling GNP figures.

And I'll trust union leaders more to have the interests of low paid workers at heart when they aren't taking home 100k themselves.

Lets make this the anti-l'oreal budget. Lets cut those who "aren't really worth it"

Cut ALL rich elite salaries to 100,000 per year

by Chris Murray

Thu Oct 25, 2012 19:44

Absolutely agree with capping public service pay. Cap ALL public service and union salaries at 100,000 per year. And don't stop there. Go for the real problem. Go after the rich. Go after those who have been the prime cause of this crisis, yet who have, incredibly, managed to spin this economic disaster as a crisis of public spending.

These rich, the truly rich, who make even the top public servants and union officials look like beggars, are getting richer, even during this deepening recession. It is time to reverse this. It is time to end the passive acceptance of great wealth, influence and control alongside massive unemployment, hopelessness and poverty. It is time to bring the issue of the distribution of wealth where it belongs - under the democratic control of the people. Politics is about power. Money is power. If democracy is to mean anything, all power, including money power, must be democratically limited by the people.

Don’t continue to be turkeys voting for Christmas. Don’t buy the nonsense from the rich and their hangers-on about high incomes being necessary to attract “talent”, the lie that “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys”. We paid fortunes, and continue to pay fortunes, and we still got monkeys. Overpaid incompetents are continuing to cause crisis after crisis, while ordinary people’s lives are destroyed.

!00,000 euro (for example) per year should be more than enough for anyone. It should provide more than enough incentive to set up a business. It allows for the fact that some people work harder, or smarter, or more effectively than others. Thousands of successful co-operatives, large and small, the world over, use such a system. A maximum income was used in Japan after WWII. President Roosevelt in the US proposed such a system during WWII. A maximum income could be a temporary or a permanent measure. It could be modified/ revised/fine-tuned/ or repealed every five or ten years. The important thing is that ordinary people are finally given the freedom to vote on an issue of the most crucial importance to them and to society. Many democracies already have a minimum income. It is time to evolve further, towards real democracy, where the really important decisions are taken by the people, rather than by elitist political/bureaucratic cabals in cahoots with unelected business or financial sharks.

One can understand elites and their useful idiots frowning and shaking their heads and giving fifty reasons why it could never work, but for those on low or middle income to not even consider trying the idea is truly like turkeys continuing to vote for Christmas. As George Bush tried to say "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." But to be fooled continually, again and again, year after year, all your life, to continue sucking up to the rich and authority, to continue, out of cynicism or naivete or apathy or despair, to do nothing, even when possible alternatives are proposed, is sheer lunacy.

Freud thought that the obsession with money was rooted in inadequate potty-training, Likewise, the famous economist Keynes said that "The love of money as a possession as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease". Even a rich stooge like Winston Churchill could acknowledge that (the people) "will not tolerate the existing system by which wealth is acquired, shared and employed. . . . They will set their faces like flint against the money power, heir of all other powers and tyrannies overthrown, and its obvious injustices."

FIGHT THE MONEY POWER. SUPPORT FULL DEMOCRACY NOW.

Public service salary profile required

by T

Thu Oct 25, 2012 21:35

There must be figures somewhere perhaps with the CSO, Dept of Finance or Revenue with a breakdown of the number of people in the Civil Service by salary. If we could get hold of those figures then we could cut through some of the rubbish rants around this and focus in those that are earning the big money and figure out how much can be saved.

this is not a matter of saving huge amounts of money, it's a matter of fair play and everyone being treated fairly.

by fedup

Fri Oct 26, 2012 00:35

this is not a matter of saving huge amounts of money, it's a matter of fair play and everyone being treated fairly.

This is currently not the case. That's why highly paid people both in and out of the public service need to be seen to be taking pain proportionately to how the weakest in society are having to.

Taking 100 euro flat tax off a person earning 50k is equivalent to taking 0.2% of their earnings

wheras for a social welfare recipient making 186 a week, it's a full 1% of their earnings.

Every flat tax hits a welfare recipient proportionally 5 times harder than a person earning 50k
The situation is twice as bad when compared to someone on 100k.

Plus that 1% is a greater proportion of their earnings.

If I take away 1% of the earnings of someone on 50k they are left with 49,500

If I take away 1% of the earnings of someone on 9672 they are left with 9575

Its not the same thing qualitatively at all.

The fact is higher paid people are much more insulated against what is going on than the poor who have hardly any insulation and feel the effects immediately. And it's these poor people that are being targetted while some sectors remain protected.

Of course the problem is really bailing out banks for absolutely no apparent gain (they are not really loaning money into the economy) and paying off foreign gambling debts that are not ours to begin with.

But since remedying that has been put off the table despite us being "special", we have to share out the problem in a fairer manner. It's not happening.

We need to see fairness or there will be problems. It's not about huge savings, it's about fairness.

No to Austerity - March on 24th November

by D_D - Dublin Council of Trade Unions

Mon Nov 05, 2012 17:27

Organised by

Dublin Council of Trade Unions
Communities Campaign Against Cuts
Campaign Against the Household and Water Taxes
Spectacle of Defiance

1 pm 24th November 2012
Parnell Square
Dublin 1

dctu_pre_budget_demonstration_24_nov_2012_leaflet.pdf 0.06 Mb