What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
So begins C.P. Cavafy’s perennially relevant poem Waiting for the Barbarians, where the threat of unseen forces is used as an excuse to do nothing; or reinforce the status quo (I reproduce the full poem at the end of this post).
I was reminded of this when reading through the debate on Sinn Fein’s private member bill to provide workers caught in precarious work contracts greater certainty of hours. What this sensible bill proposed is already standard practice in many firms around the country. However, low-road employers are opposed – those who want to use business practices like rostering as means to discipline employees (‘if you’re not a submissive and compliant worker your hours will be cut next week’).
And Fine Gael is keen to direct traffic down that low-road. According to the new Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation:
‘This Bill would destroy the largest employer in the State, the small business sector.’
Wow. A common-sense measure to provide people with certainty in hours would destroy an entire sector? And the clinching argument:
‘Consider employers who are afraid that they may lose business with Brexit on the horizon.’
Ah, Brexit – where have you been all our lives? It’s a godsend to those who need an excuse to stymie attempts to raise people’s living standards, give people greater rights in the workplace, to provide some space whereby people can democratically determine where the gains in the recovery should be directed.
Y’see, the ol’ ‘we need to maintain our competitiveness’ argument was wearing a bit thin. A lot of people were feeling that the only reason for their social existence was to serve capital, financial institutions and employers. And what party could stand over that and expect to win popular support? It also didn’t help the argument when Unite the Union published The Truth About Irish Wages, which showed Irish workers received wages well below our peer group.
So Brexit came along at the right time. Pay increase? Oh, no – Brexit. Investment in education? Sorry, Brexit means tightening our belts. Social Protection increases to bring people out of deprivation? Would love to, but, y’know . . . Brexit.
It’s not just the banded hours. Word on the street is that employers’ representatives are digging in their heels on the Low Pay Commission, using Brexit as the reason to minimise, freeze or even cut the minimum wage.
Brexit is the new Troika except now we won’t have faces and institutions to vent our anger at; it will be anonymous, immutable forces – serving the same role as the ‘bond markets’ did before we entered the bail-out programme.
How should we respond? A good place to start would be the Nevin Economic Research Institute’s recommendations found in their newly published Quarterly Economic Observer. These recommendations were not constructed with the impact of Brexit in mind, but they would be the most effective tools in the event of any negative impact of Brexit (and there will be one). Where do we start?
- If we fear a slowdown in investment because businesses are waiting for the Brexit dust to settle, what better response than to increase public investment? We should be doing that anyway to raise long-term supply-side potential; in the short-term, we could do with the demand-side benefit – more employment, more wages in the economy, etc.
- Invest in R&D. We are a laggard compared to other EU countries – we need to boost our productivity, build ladders to higher value-added production; R&D wisely spent can do that. And doing it through the public sector can ensure widespread spill-over effects (while private sector R&D is vital, too, it naturally only benefits the firm conducting it).
- Invest in education and invest in education again: start with pre-primary and primary schooling to ensure that children don’t get left behind at an early age. Educational investment will ensure that our young men and women will become the innovators, the modernisers and inventors of tomorrow (if the social and economic system allows them to apply their social and workplace knowledge – that’s a different issue, a democratic one).
- And relieve labour supply-constraints: for example, childcare. This will facilitate participation in the labour market, reduce household costs and relieve upward pressure on wages which are only fuelling childcare costs and the whole vicious cycle goes into another turn.
This is a programme to overcome any short-term hits because of Brexit or other downside risks because it is focused on the long-term.
The government, in its wisdom, wants to pull out € billion out of the fiscal space and put it into a rainy day fund. This is a poor use of scarce resources. Investment is the ultimate rainy day fund. Rather than take €3 billion out of the economy and let it sit in a deposit account gathering hardly any interest, use that money and invest – in broadband, housing, water and waste infrastructure, R&D, public transport, renewable energies (get the idea). In the long-term these new assets will provide a greater cushion than any ‘resting-in-my-account’ rainy day fund.
We can conjure up all sorts of reasons to not do the right thing. When the Brexit issue passes I’m sure our leaders and bosses will come up with new one (‘Today, the Minister for Inter-Galactic Security stated we had to freeze wages in order to anticipate the negative impact of a wayward asteroid’).
What progressives should not do, however, is deny the downsides. Rather, we should confront them realistically and put forward realistic proposals.
NERI’s proposals are a good place to start.
You can read Cavafy's full poem below the fold.
Waiting For the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city’s main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
Notes on the Front 
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