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Derek Mooney is a public affairs and communications adviser as well as a former adviser to the Irish government. He’s a columnist on Broadsheet.ie and Slugger O’Toole. 
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In the last podcast, I was talking to Tom Geraghty of the PSEU, that’s the union that represents higher level public sector workers. The interview was in the aftermath of the PSEU annual conference, where Tom was demanding a reversal of the pay cuts of 2009. There was quite lot of comment online about the interview, most of it was not very sympathetic to Tom Geraghty.
I said that I would come back to that topic, and I want to say a few things, but hang on, because there are actually some things that I want to say that are more supportive of Tom than you might expect.
But I can’t say that I agreed with him on everything, you might not be too surprised at that if you remember the interview. Some of the things that Tom said, that I couldn’t agree with, and judging by the reaction online, I’m not alone, one of those things that I disagreed with was Tom saying that the Public Sector was pro active in using new technology. I really don’t know how he gets this.
I wrote a book about governance in Ireland eight years ago, and one of the many examples of the terrible deployment of technology in the government sector was the Residential Tenancies Board, the RTB. Their job is to keep and publish a register of landlords and rented homes. It’s not that difficult.
At that time, in 2009. I criticised the fact that the RTB weren’t even able to put a simple database online with a basic search function. They published the register in raw Microsoft Excel files, and they used dozens of them, because they were on Microsoft Excel 97, which has a file limit of 65 thousand lines, so anyone who wanted to use the full register had to download dozens of these files.
It is trivially easy to create an SQL database from the information, and I could make a searchable front end for the data that would work on any computer or mobile phone in an afternoon, but I’ve just had a look at the RTB website again. Nine years later, the RTB is still using a 20-year-old version of Microsoft Excel to create massive files that have to be downloaded to be read. It’s awkward and difficult to use at best. If you are trying use it on your phone, like, say a student or other tenant who has limited space and budget, it’s hopelessly useless.
Now hang on, I do have something positive to say about Tom Geraghty’s demands.
But before that, Tom challenged me when I mentioned cases of people working in the public service suspended on pay for years. Richard Boyd Barrett TD got a response from the Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald last month saying one garda sergeant has been suspended from duty on pay, since March 2010, and another garda has been suspended since June 2010.
And a prison officer has been paid a third of a million euro since July 2010 despite having not worked a day, he’s been suspended all that time. The Tánaiste also confirmed that a further three gardaí have been suspended since 2012, with three more gardaí since 2013; another two gardaí have been suspended since 2014, with another six gardaí suspended since 2015.
All of them are being paid out of taxpayers’ money and none of them are doing a tap of work. Anyone working in the private sector could not be anything other than gobsmacked by this abuse. But I can tell you from personal experience this type of thing is not rare in the public sector.
I don’t have to tell anyone outside the public sector what the chances of getting a paid seven-year holiday are if you are in the competitive sector. You either get to work, or get put out on your ear. Now hang on, I do have something positive to say about the demands that Tom Geraghty is making
But before that, he also disputed the point that I made that there is a toxic and destructive culture in many areas of the public sector. Last February, a report on the National Museum of Ireland said that 40 per cent of its employees complained that they were regularly subjected to bullying. The psychologist who wrote the report said that 40 per cent of the staff were at risk of developing anxiety or depression, hardly surprising, and this has been going on for decades.
She said, this is a quote ‘I am over 25 years doing this work; I never heard the story being so consistent and coming from individuals not in the same room. The toxic nature of what was presented; that is what is so awful… relentless and systematic’. In case you don’t know, the National Museum of Ireland is the building right beside the Dáil on Kildare Street. It’s literally next door.
Situations like this are inevitably the fault of local management making one of two failings. 40 per cent of staff being bullied for decades is not the type of thing that can be kept secret in an organisation. Either local management are refusing to take action against the bullies, or they are the bullies. And again, this is an extreme case, but I can tell you from personal experience that bullying, very severe adult bullying is widespread in the public sector.
But I do have something positive to say about Tom Geraghty’s demands for the public sector. And it’s this. Consider the opposite. Look at the casualisation of labour. Look at any employer in the gig economy. Look at Uber. Buy a car, make yourself an independent contractor, which sounds fine, until you get sick, and there’s no sick pay. Or get old and there’s no pension, or get busy and lose your 5-star rating, or get slack, and there’s no work and therefore no pay.
Or look at Deliveroo, they had a strike of their food-delivering cycle couriers in London recently; because they were being reclassified as independent contractors, them and their bike, the company even wrote to their office staff telling them to use vocabulary such as ‘onboarding’ at a ‘supply centre’, not training at a headquarters, and to ask their riders about ‘availability’ rather than to shifts. Riders don’t wear uniforms, it’s ‘kit’ or ‘equipment’; all of this to maintain the fiction that this is not a situation of employment.
Or look at Dell. For years it provided employment in Limerick. Then the labour cost / skills matrix shifted, and Poland became more attractive. Hello Rzeszów, goodbye Raheen.
Large employers have huge power. No one worker can hope to negotiate a fair deal from them. Tom Geraghty is right that workers need to pressure governments to make sure employers treat them fairly. But that’s the point. Treat them fairly.
We need decent employment standards. Casual jobs might be fine for teenagers or students, but what happens ten years later when you want to start a family? Or trying to send kids to college? We need decent employment standards, but they have to be realistic. Employees in the competitive sector don’t push for public sector standards, because they know that even if they won them, they’d still lose. Any business that operated like the public sector would be out of business, and their employees would be out of a job, in short order.
So that’s the positive thing about what Tom Geraghty has to say. He’s right that employees need protection
But there’s also a negative thing I have to say about Tom Geraghty. When competitive sector employees hear him talking, hear his nonsense about the public sector being at the forefront of technological development, but they can’t check the register of rented properties on their phone, hear him talking about the productivity of staff who start work an hour or an hour and a half after they do, or spend years suspended on full pay for offences that would have them sacked if not prosecuted; when they hear him they don’t hear anything they can relate to.
When competitive sector employees hear Tom Geraghty, they are hearing the enemy.
And when the workers are divided, the bosses are laughing.
