Fingal county councillor Clare Daly urged Siptu workers in Aer Lingus and Great Southern Hotels to combine to organise a campaign of "escalating industrial action" to oppose the privatisation of the airline and the sale of the hotel chain.
"The privatisation of Aer Lingus is totally unjustified. It represents a threat to reasonable wages and conditions. We can face an Irish Ferries-type situation once multinational speculators move in," said the councillor, who will run in Dublin North in the general election.
"I am urging my union, Siptu, to immediately convene a major conference of workers from both Aer Lingus and the Great Southern Hotels group to draw up a serious campaign of escalating industrial action to stop this neo-liberal Government implementing privatisation policies for which it has no mandate," she said.
Cllr Ruth Coppinger, from Mulhuddart, in west Dublin, said estate management companies are "a dream for developers and a sneaky way of councils offloading services on to the backs of householders.
"At a most vulnerable time when buyers are closing the purchase of their homes, they are snared into contracts and covenants that bind them into this new form of taxation," she said.
One estate management company in a council-developed affordable housing scheme in Mulhuddart has collapsed, she said, because two out of three residents have refused to pay the annual charges.
"We will accelerate our campaign against this privatisation of council services until the practice is outlawed in housing estates and until residents in west Dublin and nationally are allowed to sunder their contracts."
Cllr Mick Barry, a member of Cork City Council and the Socialist Party's general election candidate in Cork North Central, said the Government had no excuse for leaving local authorities short of cash given the Exchequer's healthy tax revenues.
Belfast delegate Ciaran Mulholland said the peace process will not deliver any improvement in the lives of working people for as long as it is left in the hands of the two governments and sectarian political parties. "An alternative to the sterile politics of the main parties is possible," he told the conference.
