Luas drivers may not realise it but they are rushing along the road to redundancy

THE workers at Luas should be fearful for their jobs. Not in the short term, it should be said. Their industrial dispute with operator Transdev, which has so irritated the public because of the inconvenience caused by the withdrawal of services and, more importantly, by the perceived outlandishness of the original 53% headline pay increase demand, will be sorted. It has to be, because the Luas, as a major piece of infrastructure, is not going to be closed indefinitely.

So why should the workers fear that the next time their unions meet management it will be to discuss redundancies? Technology is the answer.

At some stage in the not to distant future the Luas will not need drivers. Computers will operate the trams. Already the trams at many international airports are driverless. Now it is true that these trams do not interact with other traffic or people as they are on elevated, dedicated tracks and have nothing into which to collide. The Luas lines are part of the overall traffic, giving way or taking precedence over cars and other vehicles depending on the circumstances. Therefore, drivers are needed.

Not for much longer. The era of driverless cars is approaching fast and the same will apply to the operation of public transport. You might think this cannot be safe, that human control must be maintained over vehicles that have the capacity to kill or injure but the probability is that computercontrolled cars (buses and trains) will be far, far safer than human operated vehicles.

There has been plenty of publicity recently about a Google car causing a crash during test drives on a public road. This is the exception that proves the rule that the driverless cars will be safer.

The reality is that about 1.25million people worldwide are killed in road traffic collisions annually. That figure is from the World Health Organisation. Most of that can be attributed to human error, either by a driver or a pedestrian. Smart vehicles, with 360degree vision, will be able to anticipate and avoid collisions far better.

The only thing that will hold this development back is the human fear of allowing the computers to be in control. The same goes for aircraft: in the future there will be no human pilots other than, in some cases, to provide reassurance in the event of the computer failing. Indeed, at present the pilots in reality only do take-off and landing and again, the computers might be better at that. Of course, the logical conclusion to all of this involves reduced employment prospects. If there are no train drivers, bus drivers, even taxi drivers, then what will all the people employed in those jobs do?

Every generation has a fear that they will be made redundant, usually because of changes in technology, or that they will be required to work for less money if they are to keep their jobs. It has happened in a host of manufacturing industries.

Newspaper journalists should be highly sympathetic to people in such a situation: it is not that they can be replaced by robots (you can keep your jokes and comments, thanks) but that technology has dramatically changed the assembly and distribution of news, the consequences being that employers, either because of declining revenues or an ability/need to cut costs, want to do things differently.

Uncertainty

Uncertainty is part of employment. The idea of a job for life has long been redundant, unless people work in certain branches of the public sector where they are punished for not improving their skills at the speed demanded in the private sector.

The pace of technological development has accelerated that uncertainty and brought it into many more sectors of the economy. While it creates many new jobs, it also punishes those unable or unwilling to react. And it also creates issues, often unfairly, for those who are willing or able but who simply don’t get the chance.

The ousted government spoke an enormous amount about all of the jobs that it created, reckoning that a job provides a degree of security and, therefore, a measure of satisfaction that would benefit it when people came to vote. After all, much of the depression of the last decade, post the crash of 2007, was caused by the loss of jobs or the fear of loss of employment (as well as the dramatic fall in income experienced because of reduced wages and increased taxes).

Employment is now at its highest for seven years. The workforce increased by 2.3 % – or 44,100 – last year, bringing the total to more than 1.98million, according to the latest Central Statistics Office figures, making it the highest since early 2009. There have been three years of steady growth in the jobs market. The Quarterly National Household Survey put the unemployment rate at 9.1%, or 187,500 people. That’s not good enough, especially as emigration distorted the numbers, but it’s a lot better than it was at the height of the crisis, at nearly 15%.

Some economists believe that 60,000 new jobs will be created in Ireland this year although they warn that political instability might delay or postpone investments; the possible exit of Britain from the EU, and its consequences for us, may be more important. There are even signs that many unemployed construction workers might get something and that the pick-up in jobs is nationwide, and not just in Dublin.

Yet many people remain unhappy in work because of the wages paid to them. While public sector wages increased 2.2% last year, exactly double what happened in the private sector, and there will be further public pay increases in 2016 because of the Lansdowne Road agreement, these workers compare what they have to what they had before. It doesn’t matter that the average public sector worker earns €48,400 at present and could get another €1,000 – which is good compared to the private sector and where job losses had been more prevalent. People don’t forget what they once had and that they paid lower taxes on it too.

Some wages in the private sector are increasing, in areas such as administration and support services, information technology and the professional, scientific and technical classes, all by far more than applies in the public sector.

But people working in arts, entertainment, accommodation and food experienced further pay contraction last year. The increase in the minimum wage from €8.65 per hour to €9.15 should reverse some of that but you can why people are unhappy, even if in work, and were not disposed towards the Fine Gael slogan of ‘keeping the recovery going’.

It is why workers like those at Cadbury and the Luas have gone on strike in recent weeks, looking for better pay and conditions, as teachers and nurses in the public sector did last year. Here is a striking statistic: there have been more days lost through industrial action over the past 15 months than during almost the entire period of social partnership, which lasted from 1987 to 2009. Remember that concept, when trade unions, employers and government did national deals every three years?

The problem was how significantly it raised pay rates to levels that do not apply in other countries. There is a narrative that blames all of our economic problems on the banking collapse that was caused by the property bubble. But that ignores how the tax revenues from that were used to inflate wages in the public sector and how the private sector then had to pay more to compete for labour. When the money from the boom ran out, it was those wage bills that crippled the country too.

A return to higher wages comes at a cost. That is why people react against the Luas workers. They know that higher wages will be recouped in higher ticket fares. They also resent others being able to force big pay increases when they can’t get any. And too many people remain fearful about losing their job – although for some not so much that they’re not prepared to strike.