Following the enthusiastically supported strike of last March hopes were high that a concerted anti Stormont House Agreement campaign had begun. However, any forlorn hopes that NIC ICTU might lead a fight back against Stormont's austerity have now finally been dealt the coup de grace.
 
As ICTU has betrayed their southern members on the issue of water charges and have refused to put up any resistance to the bank bail-out and subsequent austerity they have outdone themselves with their about turn on confronting the Stormont House Agreement.
 
The statement put out by Peter Bunting and the leadership of NIC ICTU accepting the “validity of the statements made by political parties” but claiming to oppose the work of these same parties in government, is packed with contradictions and absurd pronouncements which they expect their members to accept without question.  They justify their refusal to oppose the Fresh Start deal with the unsubstantiated claim that they represent the will of “civil society” in it's majority and that “direct rule would have unimagined consequences for the most marginalised in our society”. These circumstances do not have to be imagined, they are being delivered by the Fresh Start deal which allows for “direct rule” in the case of welfare reform.  
 
A sign of the size of the political retreat is given by the fact that the political elements of Fresh start, guaranteeing built in sectarian division, are accepted without comment. 
 
With direct rule for the poor and most vulnerable and a local administration committed to privatisation of public assets and a reduction in corporation tax for wealthy corporations in what way does local institutions protect the “most marginalised”? The simple answer is that it doesn't!
 
The promises made to workers in the state sector last March by Unite union officials that there would be no front line cuts have already proven “inaccurate” and cuts are proceeding under the guise of natural wastage coupled to a recruitment freeze and a voluntary exit scheme.  In education tens of millions of pounds in cuts have been announced for 2016/17 with Health and Transport also being targeted. Bus services are being withdrawn and drivers are facing increasingly onerous shift patterns without a word of complaint from their union officials, predominantly GMB and Unite, and most disgracefully the Unite leadership have allowed their Community branch members to be slandered and attacked politically by SF/DUP over the recent picketing of their offices without a offering any defence of their own members right to protest against the political supporters of the Fresh Start deal.
 
Not only have NIC ICTU refused to stand by their public sector members but the northern committee's surrender to Fresh Start also announces their willingness to collude in the administration of the programme's cuts at a consultative level. Indeed the bottom line in their list of demands to the Stormont Executive, published in December, is a pleading request that trade unions “as the largest civil society organisation in NI, be reflected in the composition of public bodies proposed under the Fresh Start Agreement.” Committee jobs for the ICTU bureaucracy is the quid pro quo they seek as payment for their “civic” role which included defusing the working class's active opposition to the deal and steering their members off the streets and back in to their workplaces. The deal was followed by a wave of appointments for trade union factotums to an endless array of consultative committees – many paying a daily £300 honorarium.
 
The imposition of austerity is not simply a Tory ideological choice that we can talk our way out of with “a strong advocacy of a workable alternative”, as Peter Bunting would have us believe. A fundamental crisis in capitalism is driving the attacks on workers everywhere and the Stormont budget cuts are designed to make the working class pay for that crisis. As part of Fresh Start a 2% year on year cut in Stormont's budget is planned and an “Independent Fiscal Council” set up to oversee spending and to push for the privatisation of public assets. This is bad enough as it stands but 2016 has began with a series of stock market collapses and as conditions deteriorate austerity measures will accelerate and become increasingly draconian.  
 
The trade union leadership have met the challenge of opposing Stormont's plans for 20,000 job cuts with nothing but rhetoric and this, coupled to the burgeoning push towards privatisation, means that workers cannot afford to wait any longer. ICTU promised resistance to the Stormont House Agreement only to refuse to confront the even worse Fresh Start deal by hiding behind the lamentable fallacy that local government protects trade unionists and the most vulnerable and must be sustained.
 
The responsibility for a fight back falls to the rank and file of the trade unions and to those socialists that are willing to place acute demands for defensive action on the trade union leaders and to organise independently of them within the unions. Like minded individuals and groups must begin by establishing rank and file networks across all unions and campaigning for action within their unions, struggling to build ground level bodies that can act independently of the bureaucracy and to begin to confront Stormont's austerity agenda.