Vol. 71/No. 35      September 24, 2007

Setiawan is one of tens of thousands of recent immigrants to Ireland, north and south. In the north, the influx of workers from many different countries combines with the weakening of divisions between Protestants and Catholics fostered by the British rulers as part of maintaining their control.

Hundreds of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Portugal, and former Portuguese colonies have come to this town of 11,000 to work.

Three large meat companies have plants here. Setiawan estimates that about 75 percent of the 1,700 workers at the Moy Park chicken plant where he works are immigrants. Seven hundred workers are employed by a temporary agency. They get paid the minimum wage of £5.35 an hour (£1=U.S.$2) with a compulsory six-day week. The company uses the mandatory overtime to undermine conditions for permanent Moy Park employees.

“If a Moy Park worker wants to do overtime they have to sign a different contract and agree to do this at the flat rate of £6,” said Setiawan, a shop steward for the Transport and General Workers Union/Unite in the plant. About half the agency workers have joined the union, he said. “We all do the same job; we should have the same conditions.”

A number of workers interviewed in the town center said that relations between workers of different nationalities are good at Moy Park. But some described racist abuse in other meatpacking plants, as well as on the streets.

An Irish-born worker from Dunbia Meats said Protestant and Catholic workers get along well in the plant. “We’re all workers,” he explained.

Still, the square in this predominantly Irish Catholic town was adorned with pro-British flags August 18 to mark the marching season of the Orange Order—a rightist group that seeks to preserve the union with Britain.

“The Orange Order used to march all the way down Ormeau Road, but five years ago they started to turn at the bridge,” said Gerard Rice, who runs a community center in Lower Ormeau, a small, mainly Catholic section of Belfast. He led mass protests in the 1990s that won the rerouting of the Order’s march. He reported that now almost none of these provocative marches go into Catholic areas. “Life has changed for our children; they can wear their school uniform without fear of attack.

“Sectarianism of the state has not gone away, though,” he added. He said Protestant areas get a greater share of public funding.

In Belfast, just a few streets separate the Catholic Ardoyne, where nationalist murals are a feature, and the Protestant Shankill, where a sea of British flags dominate. A system of school and housing segregation fuels divisions among working people.

But Simon Lynch, an engineering worker from a Catholic section of Belfast, described how Protestant and Catholic workers at his job talk about politics, including northern Ireland. Before, he said, that would never happen.

Overlooking the Belfast skyline are the huge cranes of the Harland and Wolff shipyards. For decades, this was a relatively well-paid job preserve for Protestant workers. Once employing tens of thousands, its workforce is now down to a little more than 100.

According to Belfast resident Marnie Kennedy, an office worker, the Shorts aerospace plant is one of the few large “No Catholics need apply” workplaces left. Even there, about 25 percent of the apprentices are Catholic, she said, and two years ago workers of both backgrounds struck against company moves to erode conditions. Still a long way from reversing decades of discrimination, but a change, she noted.

Lynch also described increasing openings for Catholics to get jobs. Before, he said, “people would say, ‘Are you working?’ Now they say, ‘Where are you working?’”
 
 
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