Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

In an Ireland where many workers have not yet seen the benefits of postcrisis recovery, it is nurses who have come into the forefront of the fight against austerity. Over the last two weeks the unions representing nurses have mounted gradually extended strikes to heap pressure on the government to resolve their demands over staffing levels and pay. Polls suggest the nurses’ action enjoyed a phenomenal 74 percent public support. The strike has certainly had a major effect. Across three days of walkouts on January 30, February 5, and February 7, 2019, all nonemergency hospital services were canceled, affecting more than 80,000 patients. The dispute then seemed likely to escalate, as the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organization (INMO) and the Psychiatric Nurses Association (PNA) threatened three consecutive days of direct action. Such a strike would have brought an overstretched health system to its knees. Despite the intensity of the conflict, public opinion remained solidly on the nurses’ side. As a sign of this overwhelming solidarity, tens of thousands of people marched together with nurses in downtown Dublin on February 9. Two days later, unions suspended their action, as the Labour Court made a proposal for new pay scales and promotion opportunities, to be voted on by union members in March. In many respects, this was a traditional labor dispute: it revolved around pay and working conditions, and it followed the regular route of escalation and then suspension after the Labour Court’s intervention. The tools used by the striking nurses are also familiar to anyone with some idea of trade unionism. Nurses formed picket lines around hospital buildings, chanted slogans, waved union banners, and displayed placards with demands. Yet the fact nurses took such action — the biggest strike in Ireland in recent years — was itself surprising. In the not so distant past, public sector professionals were held back from industrial action by a combination of prohibitive legislation and a certain conception of their own professional ethics. To quote Harry Eckstein, medical professionals had a “deep inhibition towards anything that smacked of trade unionism,” and nurses’ associations used to hold a similar position. Today, we see how much that has changed. In advanced economies, a growing share of labor protest now comes from the unusual suspects. Teachers, nurses, and even medical consultants are engaging in conflict with their employer — typically meaning the state. In taking strike action, workers long inhibited about using the labor movement’s repertoire of protest tactics are reenergizing the fight against austerity as a whole.

Proletarianized Professionals That such an imposing anti-austerity action came from nurses is especially surprising when we consider the long-term history of their professional associations. Although the INMO was formed in 1919, it kept its distance from the trade union movement until the end of the 1980s and it only called its first strike action in 1999. Since then however, it has played a prominent role in wage struggles and has become one of the most vocal opponents of austerity. For decades nurses’ associations had accepted a subordinate position within Ireland’s interest-group politics, in which they were also under the conservative sway of the Catholic Church. This was married with a gendered view of nursing as a charitable feminine activity — one in which the acceptance of low pay went hand in hand with workers’ subordination and sense of devotion. Individual nurses may or may not have internalized this view. Yet their associations long adopted a stance wary of industrial action. Today, such views seem outmoded, especially as workers are subject to the contradictory pressures of professionalization and proletarianization. Education, health care, and social service employees are required to perform more and more complex tasks and to make high-responsibility decisions hour-to-hour. In the case of nursing, this process has gradually freed the profession from its subordination to medical doctors: for instance, Irish nurses have recently been authorized to prescribe medication. Yet this upskilling has not been followed by an expansion of available resources or professional independence. On the contrary, these new (semi-)professions are often forced into bureaucratic structures with rigid managerialism and are not rewarded financially. In recent years, they have become one of the main targets of austerity. Public services are highly labor-intensive activities — wage costs can run as high as 60–85 percent of operating expenses — and wage cuts thus offer the biggest budget savings. An emphasis on the need to suppress public sector wages also gels with the neoliberal talk of “competitiveness” so dear to small open economies like Ireland. In this narrative, the public sector is the “sheltered, protected” sector that is isolated from global market pressures and poses a threat to the performance of “exposed” sectors, as it offers employees excessively high wages. More specifically, it is argued that public sector wages are not in line with productivity. This statement is doubly problematic. Productivity measures make little sense in sectors where outputs are not sold on the market. And productivity is by definition lower in activities which are built around real-time, face-to-face human interaction, such as education or health care. Often, low productivity (a low ratio of students to faculty or patients to nurses) can even be taken as a sign of quality. Indeed, Mariana Mazzucato’s recent book The Value of Everything convincingly argues that national statistics systematically underreport the value of public sector activities, for example by not acknowledging the crucial role that health and education play in sustaining the private sector. Despite these flaws, the idea of the unproductive public sector informs key government decisions and EU policy recommendations and has become even stronger in the wake of the global financial crisis. Irish elites insist that the country’s economic recovery after the crisis owed to responsible fiscal policies, and not the windfall revenues that Ireland enjoys as a financial and service hub for global corporations. The official mantra is that austerity worked: and in the Irish case, austerity mostly meant slashing the public sector wage bill. Employee compensation in the public sector fell in every year but one between 2008 and 2014 (by 7 percent in 2009 alone). Some of these cutbacks rested on collective agreements, which unions grudgingly signed up to when threatened with even harsher unilateral measures. These agreements also included the promise of reversing cutbacks once the public finances were stabilized. In recent years, discussion has thus turned to restoring public sector pay levels. However, the current version of the Public Service Stability Agreement, in force since the beginning of 2018, still prioritizes fiscal discipline over addressing the serious injustices in the treatment of the public-service workforce.