Any chance of pay cut for the boy who cried wolf?

Employers, predictably, issued a statement claiming “increasing pay will stop recovery”.

This alarming headline was written in capital letters and in bold, leaving the reader in no doubt as to its importance.

You can’t blame ISME (Irish Small and Medium Enterprises) for trying to protect its members’.

But really, is Mark Fielding, ISME CEO, having a laugh?

In his doomsday missive, Fielding said: “Despite all the propaganda from the left, Ireland’s wage profile is still out of line with competitor countries and has been growing faster than the EU 28 in the last two years, increases must be curtailed.”

ISME’s attacks on working people recently have been unrelenting. In July, they went bananas altogether.

On July 5, Fielding’s headline screamed: “Unwarranted wage pressure slows jobs growth.”

This missive contained a different take on a similar theme – thinly veiled threats that any increase in wages would threaten jobs.

On July 19, ISME called for the minimum wage to be replaced by a “minimum incomes policy”. This is basically a charter for businesses to pay its staff pittance, and let the State take up the shortfall.

In it he claimed the minimum wage, “failed to reduce poverty”. God help us all if we were relying on ISME to eradicate poverty.

On the same day, Fielding attacked the Public Service Pay Commission, which was set up to make recommendations on pay for public servants. Not content with pilfering workers on low incomes in the private sector, he turned his attention to Gardaí and teachers and nurses.

The pay commission, “lacked independence” warned Fielding, adding trade unions’ “excessive influence on Government must be thwarted”.

We won’t even get into an argument over how more money in consumers’ pockets, through higher wages, could actually fuel an economic recovery. Or argue that, after the guts of a decade of austerity, workers deserve a bit of a break from employers, whose businesses they kept going during the dark days.

But, perhaps we’d take him more seriously if ISME’s scaremongering about wages was issued more sparingly.

In 2014, he opposed the concept of a ‘living wage’; and threatened that wage increases damage job creation.

In February last year, he called for the national minimum wage to be scrapped. In January of the same year he said small businesses couldn’t afford pay increases.

At Christmas in 2015, he went full-on Scrooge-like in his sentiments, that – surprise, surprise – wage increases were bad for the economy.

Wouldn’t you love to know what ISME pays this guy to repeat the same old, same old?

Mark’s musings are from the ‘if you repeat the lie often enough, people believe it’ school of propaganda.

But someone really should remind him about the boy who cried wolf.

Fore more of Dara’s column see this week’s Tribune here.