Want to improve the Waterford Economy? Drive Out Imperialism!
In March of this year Socialist Republican activists staged a protest in Waterford to counter the Royal Visit of Charles Windsor to Waterford. Charles holds many titles such as Commander of the British Army Parachute Regiment, who massacred 14 people on the streets of Derry on Bloody Sunday 1972, but he was in Waterford on the 24th of March in his capacity as as the Prince of Wales and the heir to the British Throne. Our protest was well received by some however others voiced their concern over the protest making Waterford look bad for potential investors and urged the local journalist who posted pictures of our protest to take them down “for the economy”.
Of course concerns about the economy of Waterford are well founded, a city destroyed by the 2008 recession, losing Waterford Crystal leading to the loss of 1,000 jobs which is a lot when you consider the population of Waterford City is just 50,000. 2% of the population of the city losing their jobs at once has left scars on the city that it has not yet, and I contend under the current system won’t, fully recover from, and that isn’t even including the countless other jobs lost in other industry and business across the city around the same time. To put it in perspective the average household income in Waterford dropped from €22,197 in 2008 to just €18,596 in 2010[1], a drop of just under 20%, with the average family being expected to live on €3,601 less per year. With this backdrop it is completely understandable why the people of Waterford would be concerned about anything that could even slightly impact our local economy and turn away the investors that Charles’ visit could bring.
However, it is exactly that same concern for the economy and people of Waterford, and indeed of Ireland as a whole, that brought us out on the street that day. One of our banners read “Royal Parasites Not Welcome” because that’s exactly what the royal family, and any investor they may or may not bring with them, are; Parasites. Ever since King Henry VIII of England landed in Waterford in 1171 and declared Waterford City “Crown Land” the imperial pillage of Waterford has been a constant, barring brief bouts of steadfast resistance such as the Kilkenny Confederacy and during the Tan War and subsequent “Munster Republic”. However despite these heroic times of revolution the English crown and her lackeys have always been able to reassert their dominance over the city to the ruin of the people of Waterford. The Curraghmore Estate, consisting of over 2,500 acres near Portlaw owned by Henry Nicholas de la Poer Beresford, 9th Marquess of Waterford dates back to this invasion as does the Estate of the the 12th Duke of Devonshire, consisting of 8,000 acres near Lismore. The Duke also owns 70,000 acres of land in England where he lives most of the year. [2]
Since the reassertion of British control, through the Free State, during the counter-revolutionary “Civil War” of 1922-23, Waterford has remained exploited by British and other foreign imperialists. This article however will not be a historical study but a focus on the Waterford of today and how foreign imperialist companies, take the money generated in the Waterford economy, out of the hands of the workers who created all the value and bring it back to their own countries to make their rich richer while the people of Waterford are left begging for the scraps.
Waterford Crystal
We mentioned Waterford Crystal earlier in the article, however even though, as we said, it died in 2008 it’s shambling corpse is still being held up on a strings for American tourists and consumers to gawk at in it’s current form. The brand being so prestigious it’s no mystery as to why foreign capital would wish to wave it’s remains around after draining it of any life, soul or heritage.
After it’s owning entity “Waterford Wedgwood” went under due it’s mismanagement by Tony O’Reilly and others, the still thriving and profit-making Kilbarry Waterford Crystal factory was shut down with no prior notice to the workers or unions in order to pay the debts of it’s parent company, reminiscent of the servants of the ancient pharaohs being buried alive with their king to serve them in the afterlife. The assets of Waterford Crystal were brought under the management of British multinational professional services company Deloitte, who are effectively corporate fixers, and have been fined hundreds of millions for illegal business practices over the years, which in their line of work is simply the cost of doing business, they have also been known to hire ex-CIA agents to engage in corporate espionage. Their job is to make problems disappear for companies by any means necessary. In comparison to their high-level dealings Waterford Crystal was a simple affair, just package the assets into a nice little bundle to be sold on, which is exactly what they did.
Deloitte sold the brand and assets, but not the factory which still lies vacant 13 years later, onto KPS Captital, an American investment company who held it from late 2009-2015, opening the House of Waterford Crystal Visitor centre on The Mall, Waterford, keeping on a token workforce and a small manufacturing facility to be able to do factory tours while the bulk of manufacturing has been moved to Slovenia where the average wage is 17% less[3] and the minimum wage is 49% less[4].
In 2015 it was acquired by the Finnish company Fiskars who still own it today. The main activities of the current building are tours and small scale manufacturing which still generate a sizeable amount of money, as I intend to show, very little of which is kept in Waterford and given to the workers for their labour, but is transferred back to Finland to make profits for their shareholders.
Starting with their tours, which is the main focus of their Waterford centre as well as the maintaining of the illusion of the Waterford heritage that the brand is associated with. (In fact they are so committed to maintaining that illusion that their website, Waterford.com, makes absolutely no mention of the plant in Slovenia whatsoever)
The price of a tour per person is €16.50 and from the tour I took and the other tours I saw go after me there seemed to be about 15-25 people per tour, so we will say that on average there is 20 people per tour, each of these paying the standard rate of €16.50 that would mean each tour generates an average of €330. On their website it says each tour lasts 50 minutes. Glassdoor.ie lists the yearly salary of a tour guide at €19,572 – €20,970 per year, which if it was a full time position would put it below the minimum wage so we will assume it’s part time at 4 and a half days a week and use that upper 20,970 figure. That would put the hourly wage at €11.20.
A search of the site with the Keyword “Slovenia” returns no results
So for each tour the tourguide gets 3.3% of the value of the tour they just gave, they don’t even get paid equivalent to the price of a single ticket despite giving the tour to up to 25 people. That means Fiskars nets €318.80 on average per tour. Assuming there is a tour every 15 minutes, which seems consistent with what I observed, and they are operating on the opening hours they use during the summer (9:30am – 4:15pm) their profit per day would be €8,288.80, I also saw a coach group come in which was split up into 2 different groups that were given the tour at the same time so this number is likely even higher. Of course there are expenses they have to front such as upkeep of the building and the purchase of raw materials but that is more than covered by the factory setup.
While I was there they seemed to be producing stemware glasses, the tour guide said they would produce 300 of these in a day and a look in the showroom after put the average price of similar looking stemware glasses, depending on the pattern, between €100-200 per pair listed as the duty-free price (so without tax), more were towards the low end so we will say €130 per pair or €65 per glass. This would mean €19,500 in income per day.
So now let’s take all the above calculations and extrapolate them out over a year, a working year is usually ~251 days a year however the factory tours remain going on weekends most months and a review on Glassdoor complains about working St Stephen’s Day and Christmas Eve so based off this opening schedule on their website we will say in 2022 there will be a total of 328 working days
So we take our 300 glasses a day @ €65 each and that’s 98,400 glasses in a year or €6,396,000 worth of glass. We take out the current wages and material costs etc and we are left with the assumed markup of 30% per glass (standard for luxury goods), aka the pure profit and that’s €1,918,800 per year. I’m not sure exactly how many work in the factory but in terms of the departments that touch the average bit of retail crystal, blowing, moulding, quality assurance, marking, cutting, that’s €383,760 per department. So if we want to make an assumption of, let’s say, 10 workers per department (50 workers in the whole factory), then that would mean each worker would be producing, in a year, €38,376 of profit for Fiskars, keep in mind this figure is after their wages, so they are creating 38k of value in excess of what they are being paid. Money that should be in their pockets as the ones doing the work, money that should be being spent in the Waterford economy, money that is instead paying Finnish executives and shareholders for their hard work of snapping up and hollowing out a bit of Waterford heritage on the cheap off the back of the worst financial crash in our lifetimes.
Fiskars has over 100 shareholders from Finnish real estate companies to Finish pension funds. Incredible that Waterford Crystal workers who had had their lifetime jobs taken out from under them had to fight all the way to the European Court of Justice just to win a fraction of their pensions back but the profit made by the factory in Waterford is now going to pay for Finish pensions. Out of the top 20 shareholders 3 are pension funds owning a combined total of 5.03% of the company or 4,116,227 shares. In 2021 they received a dividend of 60 cents per share, or in total €2,469,736. In 2019, 4 years after Fiskars acquired Waterford Crystal, 2 of these companies held 4.36% of shares and received a dividend of €5.78 per share totalling €20,662,159. Now of course Fiskars owns many other companies so these dividends are not all coming from Waterford Crystal but once that profit is extracted from Waterford and returned to Finland that’s where it ultimately ends up, as well as in the hands of executives etc.
The amazing workers in Waterford and in the factory in Slovenia produce some of the highest quality crystal glass in the world, it was a pleasure to watch them work, with a cumulative experience I imagine measured in the centuries (the tour guide mentioned one of the workers in the Waterford factory had worked in glass making for over 50 years), so why is it they are only entitled to a fraction of what they produce? Why is it that Waterford has to suffer the decisions of management teams too rich to care and too far away to notice problems? Why are these workers with decades of experience each are dictated to by management teams with half their experience and no deep understanding of glass making, seeing it as all graphs and bottom lines instead of an age old Waterford tradition and a piece of our heritage? In an interview with the workers during the sit-in strike after the shutdown of the Waterford Crystal factory in 2008 they made it clear they understood all the problems that management had made but that they, the workers, had no ability to stop them or change course, they took voluntary redundancies and pay cuts in order to save the factory, paying for the sins of management and in exchange, when it all went under, they were denied their pensions and lost their jobs in a highly specialised industry with not a lot of transferable skills and were left to languish on the dole or entry level jobs.
Why do we let a system that denies human dignity to the many, so the few can get rich, continue to exist?
It seems now we are heading into another recession with the cost of living skyrocketing and companies struggling to find the profits they once found abundant, the system is cracking under it’s own weight, capitalism has relied on the exploitation of colonised countries for the past 400 years, with Ireland in specific facing that exploitation for 800 years, and it seems that, with their zones of influence remaining much the same since the 1990s the imperialist powers have extracted all the economic growth they can. Ireland has always been the testing ground for new policies of economic shock therapy, they tested the free market on us in the 1840s leading to the Great Famine, the introduction of Western markets and business into the Eastern Bloc by eager imperialist businesses would not have been so successful if they did not use the same polices on the backwards economy of Ireland during the 60s, China got the inspiration for their “Special Economic Zones” from the Shannon Free Zone located near Shannon Airport, the EU honed their skills on enacting austerity when they sent the Troika here after 2008. Will Ireland once again be the testing ground for the savagery of the instruments of imperialism after this next crash? Will we once again pay the price for the mistakes of those who own us? Will we send another generation of Irish, broken into servitude, to be buried alive with the failed policies, that the imperial powers dictate are our masters, under the great pyramid of capitalism?
I say no f*cking way! If they kick us out on the street open up their vacant properties and make homes out of them. If they take our jobs seize the factories and produce for ourselves. If they beat us into the dirt we show them there are more of us who produce than of them who do nothing but steal. James Connolly said the Irish people will only be free when we own everything from the plough to the stars and the past 100 years since his death have made that very clear. Take Ireland into the ownership of the whole people of Ireland and give up our dependence on those who steal from us and declare, once and for all, the independence for the Irish people.
[1] 2008: https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/economy/2008/regincome_2008.pdf
2010: https://www.cso.ie/en/media/csoie/releasespublications/documents/economy/2010/regincome_2010.pdf
[2] https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/anglo-irish-lords-of-the-manor-cling-on-to-their-big-estates-35074914.html
[3] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AV_AN_WAGE
[4] Ireland: https://www.minimum-wage.org/international/ireland
Slovenia: https://www.minimum-wage.org/international/slovenia