The Irish trade union movement today.

John McAnulty

26th September 2005

The Irish trade union movement is facing challenging times and different sections of the movement are gradually lining up around a number of different strategic responses. Which directions are developing and which represents the best strategic path for workers to take?

First we should look at the size of the challenge:
 

• A new and more intense round of privatisation and rationalisation is being unveiled both North and South.

• Massive house price inflation added to the costs of oil and tight control of wages represent a real cut to living standards for workers.

• The GAMA scandal and a number of other cases reveal a pattern of criminal conspiracy leading to superexploitation of migrant workers by bosses and the state.

• In the North the collapse of the Good Friday agreement to the right has led to a new round of sectarian attacks fuelled by loyalist reaction.

• An American garrison and troop transport centre has grown up at Shannon, making Ireland both a participant in the Iraqi war and a potential target in the violent response.

A major element of any working-class defence will have to come through the trade union movement. At the moment there are three strategic positions around which trade union activists can organize: The ICTU bureaucracy itself, a small left wing of the bureaucracy loosely grouped around Mick O’Reilly of the ATGWU and the Independent Workers Union standing outside the Social Partnership arrangement with Government and bosses.

The strategic position of ICTU can be summed up in one word – collaboration. Decades of social partnership have produced an organisation that functions only through agreement with bosses and government. The majority of paid officials have spent their entire working lives without leading workers in strike action. The crucial element of the recent GAMA scandal, where Turkish workers had much of their pay held back and worked long hours of unpaid overtime, is that these workers were trade union members paying dues to SIPTU. SIPTU, the leading force in social partnership, collected their dues while collaborating in the scam where the state hid behind holding companies to sidestep even the paltry limitations that exist on the exploitation of workers in Ireland. During the telecoms privatisation, one ICTU union took strike action – not to oppose the privatisation but to demand shares for its members!

A special conference this year outlined how ICTU planned to fight the threat of privatisation. The plan is that existing semi-state bodies which, despite the name, are 100% in public ownership, will have 10% of their value released to a private joint stock company. The privatisation of this 10% will overcome the funding starvation of the public services and the new money will stave off a more general privatisation. 

A child of two would see the fallacy of the argument. ICTU plan to fight privatisation by promoting privatisation! Just how long would any public assets remain out of private hands under this scheme? ICTU’s main problem today is a growing irrelevance. The gains of social partnership were more illusory and cosmetic than real, so as time went on the task of ICTU was more clearly policing workers rather than defending them. The level of membership and activity at rank and file level decreased, making ICTU less valuable to its partners. The ICTU conference in Belfast was so unimportant that only the speeches of the enemies of the working class, Bertie Ahern and Peter Hain, were reported – the bureaucracy had thoughtfully provided them with a platform, not to mention accepting funding from imperialism to stage the conference.

The pressure on the trade union leadership is now from the right. Are they needed any longer by their partners in the bosses’ camp? Their last big victory – a pledge to the 2004 congress by Taoiseach Ahern for the provision of low-cost housing – has disappeared in a puff of smoke. In the run-up to new negotiations on partnership, leaks from government have indicated that there will be no concessions on PAYE and the tax subsidy that the working class provides for local capital and for multinationals, nor will their be any concessions on wage increases.

ICTU are now sitting on a time bomb. Their strategy delivers less and less and they are more and more clearly revealed as policing the working class. They depend on continuing demoralisation and inaction from workers and the first stirrings of mobilisation by the class will put them at risk.

Waiting in the wings is Mick O’Reilly of the ATGWU. For many years Mick has been the leading critic of social partnership within the union bureaucracy, arguing that the union willing to be radical on this issue would recruit massively and become the biggest union in Ireland. He offered a home to Brendan Ogle and the ILDA train drivers after they were first sold down the river by SIPTU and then, when they took strike action in an attempt to recover conditions of service lost in the sell-out, found themselves the targets of scabbing by both SIPTU and the other major transport union, NBRU, that led to the defeat of the strike.

As a result of his activities Mick was suspended from his job as ATGWU regional secretary and it was only after a protracted battle within the bureaucracy that he was reinstated.

Since his return Mick O’Reilly has attended meetings to discuss the possibility of a trade union fraction critical of social partnership and frequently speaks from left platforms on issues such as the anti-war movement.

The final movement is the Independent Workers Union. Founded as a localised split from SIPTU, it has two principles: Opposition to social partnership and an absolute determination that the union be run by its members and not by a bureaucracy. Added to this can be a method – organising the poor and dispossessed ignored by the other unions

But for the workers involved in trade union struggle, the issue is not as simple as picking the right horse in a three-horse race. The issue of ICTU has still to be resolved in the union movement. That doesn’t mean that the bureaucracy are going to change direction – many of them have never seen a strike. Their standard practice is collaboration and back-room deals with the bosses. Most move on to lucrative positions with the firms they were in theory supposed to be opposing. A case in point is Phil Flynn. The former ICTU leader and Sinn Fein vice-president is at the centre of a scandal alleging involvement in money-laundering. There is no scandal from the left about his role as strike-breaker for Fianna Fail, his reappearance as an International banking consultant or his links – lowest of the low – with an unlicensed money lending operation.

All this tells us the nature of the bureaucracy, but ignores the fact that it is almost impossible to imagine a new trade union movement that was not born from a struggle of the workers to regain control of the existing organisations. We must not forget that the initial problem was demoralisation of the workers leading to a retreat from trade unionism, increasing control by the bureaucrats left behind and their actions leading to further demoralisation. This spiral can be reversed, and in any case the majority of organised workers retain formal membership and will have to be approached while they remain bound by the existing structures.

Does this mean that Mick O’Reilly and a few other left bureaucrats can provide the answer? Certainly not by themselves. Their critique of social partnership is quite a weak one, and its orientation towards the rest of the bureaucracy, either convincing them to see the error of their ways or manoeuvring against them, can never bear fruit. A good example was Mick’s own fight against being ousted from his position of ATGWU regional secretary. He fought tooth and nail to regain his position, but never at any stage stepped outside of the bureaucracy to address the workers, even though there were a number of quite respectable rallies by workers who supported him. The issue for workers remains that of their own self-organisation, independently of any section of the bureaucracy.

A more recent indication of the problems facing the left bureaucracy can been seen in the September electricians strike led by ATGWU in response to moves by the ESB to sack some workers and replace them with contract workers. The strike was immediately scabbed on by the other main unions – TEEU and SIPTU – and David Beggs of ICTU moved in to break the strike. ATGWU retreated in confusion, able to mobilise against the bosses, but unable to combat the blackleg bureaucracy even when many of the TEEU rank and file supporters supported the strikers.

In the same way that O’Reilly is tied to the bureaucracy, so also is the Independent Workers Union attached to Mick O’Reilly. The union was originally set up by supporters of O’Reilly and was meant to be the launching pad for a new union when Mick and his supporters were forced out of the ATGWU. In the end the ATGWU division was resolved and the new union found itself at its initial conference without the figure who would be its honorary leader or the massed battalions of the left bureaucracy leading a split from ICTU. This has not prevented leading figures from presenting a picture of a revived trade unionism arising from ‘the awkward squad’ – a bunch of left bureaucrats in Britain, the majority of whom in the end supported the Blair campaign for re-election in return for a mess of pottage called the Warwick Agenda. The presence of Mick O’Reilly as chief guest at their most recent conference shows that old habits die hard.

That said, the IWU is much healthier than the majority of Irish trade unionism and has recruited in areas where workers are more oppressed and marginalized. It has fought to represent migrant workers and to uncover the superexploitation that they suffer and tried to organise workers facing the front line of the latest privatisation drive. This said, individual recruitment will not proceed quickly enough to change the direction of ICTU and the IWU are too small to face down repression and scabbing by other unions – something they had to face when they tried to organise Dublin busworkers against privatisation.

The IWU have two useful things to offer in the construction of a new movement – one is the democratic framework than involves members in the running of the union and the other is an associate members’ programme that could form the nucleus for a rank-and-file movement across all the unions.

That’s what’s needed – a working-class movement that is able to confront ICTU, put demands on the left bureaucracy and take advantage of the structures and methods of organisation offered by the IWU. The reason that such a movement does not exist is that the crisis of Irish Trade unionism will not be solved simply within the trade union movement. To fully see the task in front of them workers need a vision that goes beyond trade unionism and offers a class analysis of all of Irish society – the sort of analysis and wide appeal that can only be offered by a new working-class party.