some sense of an abstract

Just as the term globalisation has led to heavily contested discussions attempting to sketch its consequences for society, its side effects in the world of work has led to an equally abundant literature on the shifting sands of the employment terrain. Trade unions have traditionally being seen as an expression of class identification, but in recent years they have been characterized by a marked decline in density in the western economies (Fairbrother and Griffan, 2002) this decline in class based organisation has led many to make the conceptual leap that class itself is no longer relevant as an analytical lens in discussions of the distribution of inequality or even as a cogent force for social change (Becks, Giddens, Sennet, Baumann). In an Irish society increasingly delineated through its globalised economy, trade union decline echoes the experience of counterparts elsewhere in spite of a localised phenomenon of national partnership agreements here designed in some sense to protect the stature of unions.

The academic themes that paint this union decline are remarkable in their similarities. The globalisation of the economy brought with it a by-passing of the state by corporations, then there is the undermining of traditional welfare rights through a neo-liberalist state doctrine and the creation of a mobilised workforce kept on its toes and forced to limit its demands due to the threat of a highly technologically charged capitalism with the ability to skip country at will. Overall this creates a condition of instability for those outside of neo-liberal power, and has undermined organizations like unions that challenged such power in the past through their dependency on a post war institutionalised class compromise in the form of Keynesian economics premised on the sovereignty of the nation state. While in Ireland, corporatist practices still dominate industrial relations the power of non-union multinationals and the shift in density of employment away from traditional mass industries with a union base to a services sector has seen a demobilisation of union participation and organisation.

Sennet's discussion of how the lack of a coherent life narrative can contribute to the decline of wider social institutions and group loyalties seems apt in describing the emerging relationship between new generation's of workers and their supposed institutions. A restructuring of work along a precarious lines more traditionally associated with the global south (Beck 2000) has pushed the image of the mass worker of the Fordist era off the historical stage and with it the premise of liberation based on this identity. Beck argues that we have reached an advanced stage of modernity that is tearing itself free of the contours of traditional industrial society and moving towards a “social structure of ambivalence (Beck, 2000)” where the world of work transforms itself into a risk society of individuated victim hood amidst a patchwork quilt of employment. The similarity of academic response to the changing terrain of work echoes through Becks, Giddens and Castells with the creation of a “project identity” replacing the “worker citizen” foundation of 20^th century societies.

With such change, as Castells posits non-class-based identity movements are the only "potential subjects of the information age.¹ But as Silver has pointed out it is impossible to escape the irony that early 20^th Century observers of the structural transformations associated with Fordism were certain that these changes in production spelled the death of the labour movements². In particular the idea that there is no alternative to this analysis has had a powerful demobilising impact on labour movements the "idea of power" itself has been an important source of workers' power. The working class, according to Antonio Negri, is a ‘dynamic subject, an antagonistic force tending toward its own independent identity’ (Negri 1988, 209). This continued renewal of class identity brings us to the point that the vision of class and its organisation used by those academics that seek to move beyond it has always been an ahistorical stationary one premised on brief historical windows. In discussions on social movement unionism Peter Waterman has pointed out that "utopian ideas have always been central to or lain beneath emancipatory movements, particular labour and socialist ones in their emancipatory moments³." It is in such emancipatory moments that working class organisations were originally forged. In the past decade the issue of alternative sources of power through new social movements has reinvigorated the optimistic case for structural change along a radical egalitarian manner. There has been an increase in the visibility of and participation in popular social movements that define themselves broadly against the structures of contemporary capitalism and by extension its work discipline. These social movements variously characterised as movements for global justice or anti-capitalist carry an emancipatory agenda emphasised in the renewed spread of a pre-figurative politics that bears a striking similarity to the early labour movement in its utopian moments and declarations of an alternative world. Through interviews with social movement participants this thesis aims to explore the relationships between these new subjects of social change, their objectives for social change and their experiences of the world of work and trade unions.

1Silver, BJ. Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge, 2003) p2

2Silver, BJ. Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge, 2003) p6

3Peter Waterman, "From Decent Work to the Liberation of Life from Work" (http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/170247)