In response to Minister Stephen Farry’s refusal to ban zero-hour contracts, Courtney Robinson – President of Belfast Met Students’ Union and representative of Socialist Youth said:
“According to DEL Minister Stephen Farry, he won’t ban zero-hour contracts because it could deny people employment opportunities. I would challenge him to find anyone who relishes the idea of an employment ‘opportunity’ where you can be bullied and coerced by your boss with the threat of being denied work, where you’re living week to week with no ability to plan ahead, where you’re denied basic rights such as sick pay and holiday pay.”
“Minister Farry is completely disconnected from the lives of the many workers who are shackled to zero-hour contracts.These scandalous working conditions serve only to benefit the scrooge employers who the political establishment at Stormont bend over backwards to please. The politicians on the hill are united in boasting that employment levels are growing and they will ‘rebalance the economy’ – this is all code for the destruction of decent, public sector jobs and massive handouts to big business to replace them with low-paid, zero-hour McJobs.”
“If the Stormont politicians cared one iota about young workers, they would overturn Stephen Farry’s decision and ban zero-hour contracts, just as Sinn Fein and the DUP were prepared to do regarding cuts to St. Mary’s and Stranmillis colleges.. If they wont do it, we will have to make them. Young workers should organise in their workplaces against these austerity contracts and join the day of action against austerity being organised by the trade union movement on March 13th.”
Recently, a number of reports into some of the worst atrocities of the Troubles have been published. The Historical Enquiry Team (HET) was behind the reports. The HET was set up in 2005 with a remit to re-examine 3,269 murders which were carried out between 1968 and 1998. Unofficially, the investigations of the HET are designed to draw a line under the past and allow us to “move on”. The reality is that each report only raises vexed issues, reopens wounds and satisfies no-one-especially not those who lost family members over the last 40 years.
