Irish Labor and the High Cost of BDS

I’ve written before about the difference between the American labor movement (one of the most pro-Israel institutions in America) and labor organizations in Europe which are a bit more fickle about where they place their labor solidarity. Last year, for example, the UK’s Trade Union Congress (TUC), decided to willfully expose themselves to the BDS virus. If they want to catch a glimpse of a more advanced stage of this particular infection, they need look no further than their equivalents across the sea: the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

Unlike the British TUC, where boycott entered the bloodstream via political maneuvering of a single group (the Fireman’s union as it turns out – no, I’m not kidding), BDS within the Irish labor movement most resembles the dynamic that’s been seen in Mainline Protestant churches in the US.

As with the Presbyterians and Methodists, an alliance of pro-Palestinian organizations working behind the scenes with key union leaders/executives have made decision which they then characterize as the “unanimous” opinion of Irish workers. Those workers have since been sent a 70,000 Euro ($100,000) bill (in the form of a levy on each member) to cover the cost of an ICTU “fact-finding” mission to the Middle East, and to organize a conference that will take place this Friday where those "findings" will be presented.

The parallels to the churches uncannily continue. Like the Presbyterians, ICTU members had no actual real say in what their union’s international policies would be, how their dues would be spent, or how an international research mission would be conducted. And like other organizations with pre-ordained agendas, the ICTU mission made no attempt to actually find facts, but simply took the familiar steps needed to ensure all of their original prejudices were confirmed (talking with few Israelis and treating the few they did talk to with skepticism and suspicion, while treating every Palestinian claim as unquestionable holy truth).

The rest of that hundred grand will be spent this Friday at an event at Dublin Castle that makes plain the ridiculously lopsided nature of this whole exercise: a day-long ICTU conference on the Middle East entitled “The Way Forward for Trade Union Solidarity.” A spokesperson for the Israeli labor movement is to be given 30 minutes to speak about the Israeli labor perspective (negotiated up from the 10 minutes the organizer’s originally planned to give them). The remaining nine and a half hours of the program is pledged to a series of local and international spokesperson dedicated to bashing Israel.

It’s hard to know how the average Irish worker feels about how their money is being spent or what is being said and decided in their name. But while the rank-and-file European union member (like the rank-and-file European citizen) is likely to have less sympathy for the Jewish state than the average American, one would think they would be uncomfortable about their union choosing to spend that kind of money on a program easily characterized as being more about self-righteous propaganda than union solidarity or justice.

This is particularly relevant given the current state of the labor movement in Ireland. Like a number of other European unions, Irish organized workers have thrived over the last 25 years through a carefully-constructed relationship with the national government which balanced limited union demands for increased wages with a government commitment to limit tax increases on those workers. This combination of labor peace and low taxation (as well as major international investments in Ireland which was seen as the gateway to Europe) has helped the tiny country (smaller than Israel, as it happens) to prosper economically in the age of globalization.

That golden age came to an end last year when the economic downturn forced the government to abandon its partnership with the ICTU, leaving both institutions to go their own way. But the ICTU finds itself at an interesting cross-road now that its central role as a partner with government has ended.

While still a major force in Irish society, labor now represents 31% of the Irish workforce (down from 62% in the 1980s). And 60% of its members are public sector workers, which means that industrial action such as strikes would much more likely be taken by doctors and air traffic controllers than by cloth-capped factory workers picketing outside a cement works. And when recent public-sector strikes (a la France) have been attempted, they have been met not by public support but outrage by a population that has gotten used to not having to deal with the inconvenience of France-like work stoppages for a generation.

In other words the ICTU, despite being the largest civic institution in Ireland, is an institution in crisis (again, similar to most of the other major organizations that have flirted with BDS). And at the exact moment when it is trying to connect with members, expand its base, discover what it stands for in the new world of Irish and European economic politics, and attempting to reconnect to the public, along comes this week’s Middle East conference which somehow pulls off being both monstrous and frivolous at the same time.

Clearly there is nothing preventing the ICTU leadership from taking union Euros and handing them over to Omar Barghouti, and there’s no question what the BDS crew is getting out of the deal. The question is, is it is worth it to hollow out the Irish labor movement just to let a single-issue partisan organization win a propaganda victory while letting a group of labor leaders strike a pose?

One Irish writer waggishly characterized the ICTU’s boycott politics thusly:

"...vainglorious hypocrisy, is perhaps one of the most defining of all Irish characteristics, the loud statement of a Consensually Agreed Piety [CAP], which is accompanied by absolutely no personal intention whatsoever to bring that piety about.

The greatest CAP of Irish life is that Ireland should be an Irish-speaking society; but what most individuals actually mean by this is that other people should go the trouble of learning the language, and then speaking it, not they themselves."

Having watched what happens when the BDS infection really hits, I shall dare a prediction that the Israeli labor movement (born in a land that also decided to resurrect it’s ancient language, but in this case actually did it) will be alive and relevant long after the ICTU (like the Mainline Protestant churches in the US) becomes an afterthought in any serious moral or political discussion.