From Ireland, EU hears hum of cheap labor

Unions worried by influx of cheap labor

The unions, however, are worried that all may not be as rosy as the figures suggest. An industrial dispute at the end of last year, for example, when a ferry company threatened to fire all its Irish seamen and replace them with Latvians ready to work for wages several times lower, "is a pointer" to what may be in store elsewhere, suggests Mr. Doyle.

To protect against similar incidents, unions and employers are hammering out the shape of a special tribunal that would rule on whether forced layoffs were genuinely unavoidable, or simply a prelude to rehiring minimum-wage foreigners.

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Union leaders also complain that the apparently limitless supply of cheap labor has pushed real wages downward for the first time in 20 years. Though independent economists challenge union calculations, "the labor supply obviously has an effect on wages," says Mr. Krieger, the EU economic analyst. "It usually means wages won't increase to the extent they would have done."

Many of those earning the lowest wages, however, are no longer Irish.

"When we opened 10 years ago," recalls Giovanni Cafolla, owner of the "Trastevere" restaurant in Dublin's trendy Temple Bar district, "80 percent of our staff was Irish. The economy was not so good in those days, so the Irish were ready to work as porters. Today, they are not prepared to work at menial jobs, so it tends to be Eastern Europeans."

Mr. Cafolla pays his chefs and waiters more than the minimum wage.

But many Eastern Europeans coming to Ireland are not treated as well as Cafolla's staff. "A key feature of many of the cases that come in here is workplace exploitation," says Delphine O'Keeffe, who works at the "Migrants Rights Centre," a voluntary organization.

A number of high-profile scandals have drawn attention recently to cases of migrant workers being paid well below the minimum wage or being forced to work long hours in substandard conditions. The overstretched labor inspectorate cannot keep track of all the abuses, Ms. O'Keeffe complains, and the migrant workers themselves tend to "keep their heads down and not ask too many questions," adds Doyle.

So long as Ireland's economic boom continues, "the economy will just go on absorbing all these workers," predicts Ms. Lougheed. She cites government forecasts that suggest the country will need to import 50,000 foreign workers a year for the next decade.

An economic slump will be real test

But if and when an economic downturn comes, tensions between the local population and foreigners over jobs are likely to pose real problems. "When the foreign population is 10 percent and unemployment is 10 percent, things will get very interesting here," says Krieger sardonically.

The better integrated foreigners are at that time, the better off they'll be, experts say. Over the past two years, says Krieger, "we have learned that if you decide on economic immigration, you have to decide on social integration too."

But indications suggest the Irish aren't on board yet. Ronit Lentin, head of Ethnic and Racial Studies at Trinity College, Dublin, says many Irish people tend to regard the migrant workers as "stopgaps, economic units aimed at maintaining our way of life, not as people."

David Walsh, an intercultural consultant, says that "The Irish think of themselves as very welcoming of foreigners - and they are ... as long as the foreigners don't stay."

Belatedly, perhaps, the government is making a very public effort, through advertising campaigns and speeches by top officials, to remind the Irish - accustomed to being part of an overwhelmingly white, Roman Catholic, and homogeneous society - that Ireland is now multicultural.

Public attitudes change more slowly than economic reality, however. "The whole concept of monocultural Irishness is biting the dust," says Dr. Lentin, "and things are changing.

"But there is no real admission of that. The real consequences of rethinking our contract with our Irishness are still baffling."

Other observers are more sanguine, and say that with time, as the Irish grow accustomed to the large numbers of foreigners in their midst, they will also recall their ancestors' experiences as strangers in strange lands.

"The biggest issue is that this is all so new, it happened so fast," argues Pat Normanly, who works as the Equality and Diversity Officer at the capital's bus company. "There is a great opportunity to get it right, because of our history."

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