The cost of living remains the single biggest issue for workers. A poll in July found “cost of living and housing remain the biggest issues for the country, at 66% and 58% respectively”. Corporate profits for supermarkets, energy companies and the financial markets continue to soar. Reuters report that across Europe “energy company profits are estimated to have the highest growth rate of all sectors, at 135.8%“.
Public Sector Pay Ballots
Nineteen public sector unions are balloting their members currently with a recommendation to vote for industrial action, up to and including strike action. There has been a lack of any negotiations with the government on a pay deal – the last one finished in June. Public sector workers have seen an erosion of their pay over the last five years. For example, Forsa members have seen a real-terms cut of 5% between 2021 and 2025.
Exploratory talks with the government in June failed as the government refused to give any assurance over pay, prioritising public sector reforms.
The government is more exposed than usual to the impact of public sector strike action due to the EU presidency. Widespread strike action would be a significant embarrassment for the government, threatening to disrupt the actual functioning of the presidency, as civil servants take industrial action.
The Sunday Business Post commented, “the scope and scale of potential industrial unrest this autumn is unlike anything a modern Irish government has faced.”
It is clear the union leaders want a strong mandate and a Yes vote for industrial action, through the many briefings members are receiving and the social media campaigns. This is a very different position to what has happened over the past few decades, where the pattern has been a rather weak agreement.
This was then sold to the union members on the basis that the only alternative is industrial action and “sure you wouldn’t want that, now would you!”. This time round we are being recommended to vote for strike action ahead of the substantive negotiations.
A History of Compromise
This course of action by the trade union leaders will come as a surprise to many. For the past forty years the default position of Irish union leaders has been to seek partnership agreements with the government.
The roots of this lie back in the 1970s and 1980s with the militancy of Irish workers and the defeat of the British miners in 1985. Paul O’Neill previously outlined a key example,
On a bitterly cold January 20 1980, over 350,000 workers marched through Dublin in the largest of the tax protests. Approximately 700,000 workers took part in a general strike in the twenty-six counties. There were protests of 60,000 in Cork, 50,000-60,000 in Limerick and 30,000 in Galway. The strike brought work to a halt in shops, factories, offices, schools, pubs and restaurants.
However, this militancy was in part undermined by economic crises in the 1980s. Charlie Haughey, the Fianna Fail leader, promised a political exchange where the union leaders would have some influence over government tax and labour policies in return for wage moderation and industrial peace.
The British miners’ defeat loomed large in the calculations of the union leaders, but they drew the wrong conclusions. The miners were left isolated, fighting Thatcher’s Conservative government on their own while the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the Labour Party largely turned a blind eye to the dispute.
Unwilling to contemplate such a combative strategy, social partnership appeared much more acceptable. The first social partnership agreement between unions, government and employers was signed in 1987, and agreements followed until the Great Recession.
The social partnership years had the desired effect on trade unions, curtailing militancy and largely guaranteeing industrial peace. But it also hollowed out the union movement, weakening rank and file organisation and strengthening the power of union officials.
Even after full social partnership finished in 2009, the public sector trade union leaders still clung to this model through a series of agreements over pay, which included no strike clauses, during the 2010s and up to June this year.
Unions and the union bureaucracy
So why are the union leaders now rejecting their strategy of the past forty years and calling for a mandate for industrial action in the ballots?
In capitalism, unions are the key first defence organisation of workers. Faced with constant attacks from managers and owners, workers form collective organisations that seek to ameliorate the worst effects of this exploitative relationship. Unions are therefore not revolutionary organisations that seek to end capitalist exploitation.
There also emerged a social layer of full-time union officials, which is often referred to as a trade union bureaucracy. This layer of officials holds a contradictory position in the labour movement. On the one hand, their role is to secure the best possible pay and working conditions for their members.
On the other hand, they are separate from the workers they represent, not subject to the day-to-day discipline of workplace relations. They don’t have to deal with conflicts that arise, and their pay is a multiple of that of their members.
They will try to protect the union apparatus at all costs, even if that means selling out their members’ interests. The German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg put it like this, “There is first of all the overvaluation of the organisation, which from a means has gradually been changed into an end in itself, a precious thing, to which the interests of the struggles should be subordinated.”
Over the past forty years, governments have exploited this, with anti-union laws that threaten to sequestrate union funds if the officials do not control militancy, as well as outlawing some solidarity action.
One conclusion might be that if we only had better, more principled leaders in the unions, we could avoid these issues. This, however, is an incorrect conclusion. Ultimately, because of their social position, the beliefs of individual trade union leaders are of secondary importance to the compromises, delivering industrial peace and protecting their own social position.
These contradictions mean that socialists have a nuanced approach to how we work in unions, working both with and against the union leaders. .
Socialists and unions
Union officials are susceptible to pressure from below. Often this pressure comes from within the unions themselves. However, sometimes outside events can be the stimulus – that is what has happened with the current ballots in the public sector. Here, the fuel protests earlier this year and the government’s concession of a €750 million package to support business mainly set a precedent that is exerting pressure on the union officials. FORSA’s general secretary Kevin Callinan recently stated,
“Members of trade unions are asking fair questions… they’re looking on at this and they’re seeing that it appears now that he who shouts the loudest gets heard, and that’s not lost on people.”
The over-riding principle for socialists is to build the confidence, organisation and combativity of workers in the fight for a better world. When it comes to industrial disputes, this starts with the clear premise, “Never with the bosses – Always with the rank and file”.
The issue then becomes what should our attitude be to the contradictory role of the union officials. A contradiction requires a conditional response, one that was best summed up by the Clyde Workers’ Committee in 1915:
“We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.”
Applying this understanding to the current position in Ireland, some trade union leaders may believe this is the best course of action while others are engaging in a bureaucratic manoeuvre. The history of the last forty years would lead activists to believe that the latter is more likely, raising the potential to be cynical about the ballots.
We have to fight against such cynicism as it leads to passivity and puts no pressure on the union leaders. The very fact that the ballots are happening opens the possibility for socialists to make an intervention into the discussions among public sector workers.
A Hot Autumn?
There is a broader context to these public sector ballots, which indicates something of a revival in organised labour. First, according to the CSO, there are now over 100,000 more members of trade unions than a decade ago. While some sectors have seen membership numbers stagnate or decline slightly, it is the public sector – including civil servants, education and health workers – where there has been significant growth.
Second, there is evidence over the past year of an increased willingness among workers to fight, including taking strike action. In recent months, care workers in north Dublin and Shankill have taken strike action, with the latter group winning a pay rise. Medical workers, perfusionists, took strike action in June and there was a national one-day strike of ambulance workers in May.
In August workers at Oberstown Children’s centre conducted their third one-day strike of the summer and protested outside the Dept for Children. Meanwhile, tech workers at Covalen have been fighting for union recognition and better redundancy payments since the end of last year, including strike action in May.
It is less than a year since the school secretaries and caretakers’ indefinite strike action threatened to generate secondary solidarity action among teachers and SNAs that would close schools. If the strike had gone into a second week all the indications were of schools having to close.
Such actions cannot simply be dismissed as manoeuvre by a trade union leadership that is desperate to re-establish social partnership. When we take the government’s weakness, the public sector ballots and the bubbling local disputes together, we could well be in for a hot autumn.
