PS I’m another private sector foot soldier going through a third period of unemployment in a decade not some Public Sector cheerleader…

Of course, not every one of the 200,000 were private sector either. Thousands of public sector workers on contract lost their jobs as well. But for you it’s us private sector workers (including you and me) who are the victims. No-one else.

Think it says more about your level of analysis than anything else. And your terrible blindness to the bigger picture. Have you thought of ringing Joe Duffy about this one?

By the way, I remember you once commenting on how you were recently retired. It was on a post where you used your personal experience of being recently retired to make your point.

Another time, you were a teacher, when the discussion was on teaching.

Then you are in I.T. when THAT was the discussion piece.

Then, you said you’re a lecturer in a third level institution with a full-time secretary, a nice permanent position as you phrased it I believe. Again, it timely suited the discussion.

Now, today, you’re recently made redundant, from a teaching position it seems - a permanent teaching position, that’s somehow in the private sector - and now you’re looking for a job, just in time for a discussion on work and unemployment.

How convenient. How troll-esque.

Anyway, the number for liveline is: 1850 715 815

Hopefully, if he has time, Kevin Doogan will write something on the current crisis, and how his findings can be applied to it, or not, for Irish Left Review.

But here’s a personal story too. I work for an Irish company that was recently taken over by a significantly large MNC. The most apparent change was that the MNC had a large HR element, whereas the small Irish company had none. When we were briefed by the HR person we were told that the parent company wanted all employees to be permanent. They didn’t like contract workers, who they referred to as ‘contingency’ workers. That doesn’t mean that there are not plenty of ‘contingency’ workers in the place, but these are people who prefer to work on a contract basis anyway as they believe themselves to be ‘working for themselves’.

Soviet-era spokesmen also spoke with blithe assurance about Ukranian tractor production being up 500% (yet again) this month. But sometimes one must instead believe the facts staring one straight in the face. Nary a new tractor was seen for years within a 1000km of Kiev, neither can anyone deny the reality of job insecurity when faced with the absolute carnage in the labour market.

In past year, this economy has suffered a net loss of nearly 200,000 jobs (mine included recently, so I have some direct experience on which I speak). If you have trouble getting your head around the scale of this contraction, it would be equivalent to fully half the public sector suddenly being out on the street (and just not for a fun day of picketing neither). Some of these people will never, ever see a permanent job again in their working lives. I’m still in the optimistic early phase of unemployment and fully expect to be back up on the horse again soon, but I strongly suspect it’ll be a much less secure gig, probably on a fixed-term contract.

The credibility of left wing discourse is seriously damaged by this blatant reality-denial. First we were assured that we really weren’t seeing pay-cuts at all despite a shrinking pay packet. Now we’re told our jobs really were quite secure all along, we just never noticed. What next, denial that there’s a pension crisis in the private sector? No you can’t save for your own late poverty-stricken retirement, you must instead pay more tax now to ensure a comfortable early retirement for your elders and betters.

Yes, indeed. There was an interesting exchange on Newsnight last night between a silly faux-intellectual hedge fund manager and the Danish PM, Rasmussen: Rasmussen accusing hedge fund guy and his ilk of bringing down Greece, whereas HFG said he was just gambling on his predictions of the wrong actions of politicians……… and in a way, the latter is closer to being right.

It’s something that David Harvey and Michael Zweig talk about, that business and finance know all too well the power of nation-states and that’s why they do all they can to gain political control of them through the various non-ballot means - lobbying, bribery, intimidation, etc.

Doogan’s point also holds here, that the acceptance by the Left of the neoliberal ruse, that capital is rootless (and ruthless), only serves to make the recapture of the nation-state by capital all that much easier.

Of course in Ireland there is no “recapture”, as capital has always had this nation-state by the balls. In many ways, Ireland is the template for the future of Europe, and Europe’s citizens should be quite concerned about that little scenario.

This looks good…..

Interesting point that, and, in a way the flipside of something I heard argues in a paper recently: the notion that global capital dissolves, or renders irrelevant national boundaries is exactly wrong - actually, global capital depends on the existence of states, and, crucially on their inequalities - so our tax rate, India’a standard of living, varying degrees of regulation and so on, determine how goods produced in one place can be sold somewhere else, and how the income can be ‘domiciled’ somewhere else again. If there really was ‘a global market’ then all that leverage would disappear.