CPI Statement on Thomas Cook workers

The Communist Party of Ireland condemns the arrest and detention of about twenty former employees of Thomas Cook Ltd, along with a number of officials of their union, the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association, in a dawn raid raid on the premises that the workers had been occupying since Friday 31 July.

These detentions mark a new low in the Irish legal and court system and expose once again the true nature of those institutions. There is clearly one law for the rich, for employers and corporate interests and one for workers, their trade unions, their families, and their communities.

We are living in a society in which people at the very top have been engaged in various dubious and illegal activities. We have banks and property speculators, who in the eyes of many workers should be in jail, walking the streets, appearing in the mass media, lecturing workers about having to take cuts in wages and terms of conditions, telling us that we have “priced ourselves” out of jobs. Yet nothing is done to bring these people before the courts.

The Communist Party calls on the whole of the trade union movement to stand up and defend the rights of these workers and the TSSA. It is symptomatic of how far out of touch elements of the ICTU and the leadership of the Labour Party are with working people that they have yet to speak out on this outrageous attack on a group of workers.