An Uncertain Future For The Unions
An Uncertain Future.
The future for the Irish trade union movement is far from certain. Without ignoring the historical complexities and national contexts of specific labour movements, it remains possible to sketch a pattern of shared experience across the European trade union movement (Fairbrother & Griffin 2002; Croucher & Brewster 1998). Trade unions experienced a period of relative stabilisation in the years after the Second World War. An institutionalisation of class conflict enabled a degree of input into national economic affairs unprecedented in their history. Despite this recent extensive economic restructuring in the era of globalisation resulted in decreased membership densities and a decline of participation in the various movements. This downward slope in unionisation figures was considered most severe in the United Kingdom, with membership of TUC unions declining to less than a third of the workforce by 1995. In a country where the labour movement played an often dramatic and defining role in the unfolding of history and culture, this fall from a historic peak of over 13.2 million unionised workers in 1979 to just 7.85 million by 1998 (Fairbrother 2002, chapter 3) suggests a massive reversal of fortunes and a hugely declining power base.
This sharp rupture with historical precedent in the mid 20th century has led to much investigation, commentary and analysis in the fields of industrial relations and labour process theory. As broadly mentioned above, the UK is not alone in its experience. Irish unions too have seen a comparable reversal in membership statistics in the past two decades. There has been what on the surface appears like a numerical increase, but when we consider an overall unprecedented spurt in employment growth in the 1990s we are left with a net effect of decline that has yet to be reversed. In a country increasingly delineated through its much vaunted globalised economy, this process of continuous trade union decline since the early 1980’s echoes the experience not just of the UK, but of many of our European counter-parts.
Firstly the historical emergence of the Irish trade union movement will be examined very briefly to sketch the broad contours of its rise and present state of decline. The chapter will then move to examine in much more depth reasons for union decline in the past two decades, a period where Irish society went through a series of vast social, cultural and economic changes associated with the term ‘Celtic Tiger’. Finally the chapter will conclude by commenting on an uneasy fatalism within parts of the union decline theses, one that privileges unions as a site of labour collectivity and thus obscures the often localised and informal contestations of power that can occur within workplaces.
Brief Historical Contours.
Conceived to safeguard the welfare of those in a particular trade regardless of status within it and to confer civil liberties, the Irish Merchant Guild was founded in the 1170’s. By the mid Eighteenth century there was a massive reduction in the role played by the Irish Merchant Guild, as new social and economic forces washed away a previous ability to regulate aspects of production and working conditions in the relative autonomy of pre-industrialized production. Increasingly faced with a dwindling economic role they became more important for their political role in conferring voting rights in sectarian municipal and parliamentary elections. Preoccupation with political representation and a concentration of production and ownership led to a scenario where the guilds no longer represented the interests of a whole trade but an emerging dominant class within them as ‘great differences of degree concealed within the term artisan’ (Thompson 1980, p257) became apparent. In 1833 among a bricklaying guild of 104 members only 39 were engaged in the trade and only seven were journeymen. Prior even to their abolition in 1846, the roots of a modern labour movement was being sown as combinations of journeymen began to assert themselves against their masters, providing self-organised measures of social security in times of illness and unemployment while also advancing concerns regarding the conditions of their working day.
Arising from early labour disputes, these relatively open yet underground combinations faced a series of hap-hazard measures of repression from the Irish parliament dating back to 1729 (Boyd 1985, Chapters 1 and 2). The first significant recognition of working class combination as a political force by the Irish parliament came with legislation in 1780, which sharply prefigured the later 1799 British combination act extended here after the Act of Union. This legislation provided a legal frame work for fines for violence and actions arising from unionisation and collective bargaining. Opposition to it resulted in a massive mobilisation of 20,000 skilled workers in the Phoenix Park. This was an event that contributed to a shared sense of confidence and momentum ensuring legislation would do little to stem a rising early labour movement entered into a period of consolidation throughout the 19th century. From about 1850 on a British model of unionism based on the organisation of skilled workers and a labour aristocracy replaced the persistent radicalism of earlier years, echoing the neighboring decline of the charterist movement (Boyd 1985, Chapters 6). By the 1880’s cross-industry trades councils concentrating mainly on skilled craft workers were established in major towns like Cork, Belfast and Dublin and after a history of affiliation to the British TUC, the Irish TUC was founded in 1894 (Fergus and D’Arcy, 1988).
Histories of the early 20th century accord Larkin and Connolly with the importation of syndicalism to Ireland. Syndicalism contained a radical critique of capitalism as a social and economic system and as such was ideologically motivated to organise the ‘one big union’ to form the basis of an ‘industrial republic’ to ‘crack the shell of the political state and step into its place (Connolly 1908).’ Syndicalism invigorated the labour movement in Ireland with a new focus on the organisation of unskilled labour. This model resulted in a spurt in the growth of union organisation leading to a series of intense labour disputes in the maritime economy, ranging from the Belfast dock strike of 1907 then later in Cork and Wexford. This first wave of militancy would end with the infamous 1913 lock out, a dispute that almost pushed the ITGWU, the union most sharply associated with these early utopian years into dormancy.
This era of union growth can be split into two waves of radicalism. The first wave of radicalism occurred during a period of industrial revival but a second wave of radicalisation from 1917-1920 developed as a result of the intersection of a number of other factors. Union growth occurred against a backdrop of war time shortages, wage suppression and employer resistance to unions. An economic boom in agriculture developed as a result of compulsory tillage to counteract food shortages. Although important in the first wave of radicalism, the role of dislocation in the passage from agrarian life to urbanisation, poor living conditions and subjection to industrial work discipline can be downplayed as union growth took off in the face of national revolution. The dramatic organisation of farm labour accounted for just under 30 per cent of ITGWU members in the period (Roche 1994, p17). Agrarian experiences of White Boy or Land League collective action exerted an influence in accounting for geographical patterns of collective action in the period. Popular militancy and mobilisation (Kostick 1996; Yeates 2000, p579) during the war of independence too played a role in growth as unions became associated with national martyrdom after Connolly and the ICA’s involvement in the 1916 rebellion.
The movement continued to play a massive role in the conscription crisis of 1918, including a one day general strike and the blacking of military supplies and personal for transport throughout the Anglo-Irish war. At its peak this period witnessed a series of land seizures, factory occupations and short lived soviets that coincided with a European working class insurgency.
Despite the membership of unions affiliated to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions rising from about 30,000 in 1894 to 250,000 in 1920 (Roche 1994, p19) there was no ‘spiral of politicisation (Roche 1994, p25) affecting labour during these ‘emancipatory moments (Waterman, Interactivist Exchange)’ due to its short intensity. Instead of contributing to the engrained social democratic or communist traditions that arose as a result of post-war labour radicalism in Europe, these militant years served to strengthen Irish nationalism. A process deepened by the deference exhibited by the labour movement leadership to the nationalist politics of Sinn Fein in the 1918 general election. As a result Irish political life would became structured along divisions between nationalist parties. The consolidation of a state hostile to working class militancy and willing to confront it with troops as in the case of the 1923 farm labourers strike (Fergus and D’Arcy 1988, p7; Kostick 1996; Roche 1994, p139) and a downturn in agriculture and trade contributed to union decline as a once radical vision blurred in maintaining status and differentials amongst sectors, rather than tackling the broader social and political issues that had animated the concerns of the previous decade (Gunnigle, McMahon and Fitzgerald 1999, p12). Broader global economic depression and low morale saw membership of congress fall from 190,000 in 1922 to 92,000 in 1929, a process underscored by the dramatic collapse and splitting of the ITGWU due to a quarrel between charismatic communist Larkin and cautious bureaucrat O’Brien (Fergus and D’Arcy 1988, p7) as a conservative nationalist and collaborationist politics obscured by the Irish revolution came to the fore.
Fianna Fail with support from the Labour party were more conciliatory in office from 1932 on, exhibiting hints of corporatist tendencies in the state’s relationship with the unions that slightly owed to the pressure of a Catholic vocationalism finding expression in the politics of Cumann Na Gaedhal. The thirties were an era of broad protectionist economic measures used to increase the self sufficiency of the burgeoning state and encourage the growth of native industry leading to increased employment with unions pushing for higher wages and witnessing increased membership growth (Roche 1994, p141).
The onset of the Second World War and its associated supplies shortage contributed to a decline in industrial output of a quarter. Agriculture still dominated with industry accounting for just 17 per cent of employment as late as 1946, enterprise was characterised by small establishments and only forty businesses outside the state sector employed over 500 workers. Divisions that had emerged between British based union and Irish ones during the rise of nationalism led to further stagnation and a split in congress in 1945. The post war recovery led to a 70 per cent rise in both strike and union membership, but this was a period where economic growth concealed the limitations of the protectionist years and a recession hit in the 1950’s (Gunnigle et al 1999, p12). Already by the mid-forties, Lemass’ critique of protectionism was leading him towards the instigation of major changes in industrial relations (Roche 1994, p147) encouraging a rationalisation of union structures in the wake of the 1941 Trade Union Act and the setting up of the Labour Court in 1946. With Keynesian inspired intervention in the economy, rates of union membership rose 7 per cent through out the 1950’s with unions resigning themselves to consolidation rather than militancy during a period of economic decline.
By the 1960’s significant state effort was being poured into attracting foreign investment, with the Industrial Development Authority creating grants as incentives for setting up here, increased organisation of white collar workers contributed to a density rate of 57 per cent by 1970 (Roche 1994, p153). With rising living standards and inflation throughout much of the sixties, wage costs and industrial disputes were seen to jeopardise Irish competitiveness in attracting multinational investment. From about the mid-1970’s the terminology of ‘social partnership’ began to describe the developing tri-partite industrial bargaining systems which began to cover a wide range of social policy in a series of national pay agreements from 1971 on. By 1978, industrial output reached two and a half times the 1926 level with unionisation rates reaching 70 per cent and strike action doubling (Gunnigle, McMahon and Fitzgerald 1999, p13). Unofficial strike action, a drift to shop steward power and a growing movement of protest against the taxation system by PAYE workers in 1979 threatened to disrupt developing corporate working relations between the state, unions and employers and by the end of the decade formal tri-partism was concluded.
The eighties were characterized by a set of acute problems facing the Irish economy. The national debt, outward migration and unemployment figures spiraled and a developing employers offensive of ‘macho management (Gunnigle, McMahon and Fitzgerald 1999, p14).’ took off amidst recession leading to a number of dramatic defeats in militant workforces such as Rowntrees. This period of economic despair and the erosion of the labour movements confidence heavily impacted on trade union membership among the workforce, with a fall from a historic high of 61.31 per cent in 1980 to 57.10 per cent in 1990 being described as ‘the most serious and sustained declines in membership since the 1920’s (Roche and Ashmore, 2002)’ with 87,000 members leaving the various organizations. This created the conditions for a ‘new realism’ amongst the bureaucracy of the union movement as it adopted the concerns of the Irish state’s development project. This process set the stage for social partnership as we know it today (Allen 2000, p 113-114) with the introduction of the Process for National Recovery in 1987. This process of ‘social consensus’ has been described as a ‘crucial ingredient (Sweeney 1998, p90)’ in the process of Irelands recent economic resurgence.
With the sustained economic boom of the Celtic Tiger, unions experienced a revival to a membership density comparable to the early 1980’s. This strengthening of density however had not kept pace with a growth in employment in the overall workforce, meaning that in real terms net union density has in fact exhibited all the continued signs of decline. In an era where unions exert more political influence than ever before, the levels of membership and capability for collective action forming the base of this power, is undergoing dramatic erosion. Data on unionisation published by the Central Statistics Office1 as recently as September 2005 confirms this, indicating that just 35 per cent of employees in Ireland are members of a union compared with 46 per cent 10 years ago. Sharp differences of membership rates are emerging between the public and private sector with a particularly foreboding trend of non membership among under 25 year olds.
The Union Decline Thesis.
There is a massive convergence of focus amongst academics looking at the phenomenon of union decline. Fairbrother and Griffin highlight the shared concerns in much of these discussions. The various union decline theses revolve around an axis composed of structural shifts in the economy, changes in employer ideologies, shifting relations between states and unions and the changing demands and composition of employees (Peter Fairbrother & Gerard Griffin 2002, p7). Roche identifies three major factors affecting the trend of unionisation in Ireland (Roche 1994, Chapter 3) ranging from cyclical to institutional and structural influences. Cyclical influences arise from the business cycle, unions may become positively associated with rising wages and living standards or in the case of inflation employees may increasingly turn to them to maintain a standard of living they have become accustomed to. Periods of high employment or labour market ‘tightness’ also affect the ability of employers to retaliate in the wake of unionisation while ‘slackness’ may threaten union members’ employment. Institutional influences range from state policy on industrial relations, the ideological motivation of employers to the degree of decentralisation in bargaining. Hyman2 postulates that the crisis of trade unionism has three underlying characteristics. These are decreased homogeneity in the working population including differentiation between unions, an intensified restructuring and deregulation that can be conceptualized through globalization and the erosion of egalitarian or utopian currents and commitments within the over all labor movement. This chapter will now turn its focus to applying aspects of these theories of union decline to the Irish context over the past two decades. By using a variety of social research and analysis it will deepen an understanding of the processes through which macroeconomic change; the rise of heterogeneous employment; changing employee identities and individualization and a union movement that has refused to engage in the creation of alternatives have contributed to an overall decline in the Irish union movement.
The Effects Of Macroeconomic Changes.
Robust and deep rooted changes in the Irish economy became apparent with economic resurgence from the mid 1990’s on, a process confirmed when Ireland found itself inhabiting poll position on a ‘globalisaiton index’ in the US Foreign Policy magazine by 2001. The index was based on a series of factors ranging from levels of inward multinational investment, to travel and communications - all used to identify the degree of global economic integration (Fagan 2003, p110). Reliance on multinationals for industrial investment had being developing from the late sixties (Hearn 1998, p40). In 1995 Ireland replaced the UK as the main European site of US electronic hardware investment with over 400 US firms employing 50, 000 people and with rates of investment going back to these firms at three times the EU average from 1983 – 1994. The country now attracts up to one quarter of all US direct investment for the EU with a total of over 1,000 multinationals employing over 100,000 people in areas as varied as electronics, software and pharmaceuticals (Gunnigle et al 1999, p 404-405).
In the construction of ‘hagiographies (Coulter 2005, p10)’ around the growth of the Celtic Tiger and the sudden attractiveness of the Irish economy on the global market, popular discourse hangs on a series of definitive breaks with tradition, rolling in with the more recent ideological acceptance of neo-liberalism and astute policy making at the level of government dating back to Lemass. These factors are seen as arising from a mainly indigenous ingenuity; the introduction of free schooling created a highly educated workforce; the adoption of a variety of cultural values associated with modernity; fiscal prudence in the eighties; economic deregulation; low corporate taxation; industrial compromise through social partnership and the efforts of the IDA all contributed to a stable macroeconomic environment attracting significant foreign led investment.
More critically engaged (Hearn 1998; Allen 2000) analysis of Ireland’s economic renaissance contradicts this prevailing chorus of appreciation for the decisions of past Irish elites. These critics home in on a series of contradictions and the significant role played by a turn around in the US economy after industrial restructuring and resultant investment in the high tech sector from the seventies on. The global backdrop to a rapidly changing Irish economy is made up of a significant shift from fordist to post-fordist models of production. This process, characterized by the informatisation of production, involves a move from an economy ideally based on mass production to a post-modern knowledge economy defined by production premised on the manipulation of signs and symbols in a network form of capitalism (Hardt & Negri 2001). With the changing industrial composition of capitalism, American high tech companies sought a bridgehead into the significant European market. Ireland offered numerous advantages to companies emblematic of this trend such as Intel. With a low rate of corporation tax of 10 per cent until 2002 (a rate undercutting the rest of Europe), a young work force hirable at rates once standing at the bottom of the EU and a strong pro-business political climate with broad acceptance of the governments economic strategy by the unions ensuring relative industrial peace (Allen 2000, pp23 -27).
One aspect of the growth associated with this foreign direct investment is a reliance on the performance of the US economy, ripples of which could be seen with the IDA’s announcements in 2001 of record job losses in TNC’s concentrated in the IT sector and many of the symbols of the Irish industrial boom such as Motorola and Gateway (O’Hearn 1998, p39). With an economy highly dependent on foreign investment the Irish state is now heavily tied into the economic discourse of neo-liberalism, with an emphasis on integration into the European market, deregulation of the economy, the creation of a flexible labour market and the handing over of areas of life previously exempt from market control to the market. In this model of social transformation, the linear productive model of the assembly line has been replaced by the networked design, where control can be exercised at a distance and production is effectively fluid and capable of being uprooted from specific geographical locations in response to economic decline, labour organisation or state intervention. This process has undermined significantly both state sovereignty and the labour movement’s ability to act as a “major source of social cohesion and workers representation (Castells 1997, p354)” as the fate of multinational enterprises in Ireland becomes determined in the board rooms of corporate executives rather than in the cabinet (Roche 1995, p40).
Traditionally multinationals were believed to conform to the industrial relations models in a host country. Since the adoption of a ‘union neutral’ stance by the IDA in attracting multinational investment, much analysis has been advanced that overturns this ‘conformance thesis’ (Roche and Geary, 1995) instead emphasizing how multinationals now redefine the patterns and traditions of industrial relations in a country. The level of this effect have been the source of much dispute (T. Turner et al) but there is a prevailing consensus, even among those dismissing it, that amongst employees and even unions for 'Irish operations to remain viable, they must move up their corporation’s ‘value chain’, through engaging in higher value added activities, and concurrently improve their competitiveness (Clark et al, p513)'. The reliance on foreign investment leads to facilitation of an American led ‘non-union’ approach in the host business model that owes more to the political experience of years of US regonomics than the recent rhetoric of social partnership in Ireland.
An overview of firms established at Greenfield sites in Ireland from 1987 to 1997 found that 65 per cent of firms could be classified as non union (Gunnigle et al, 2002). This phenomenon was most prevalent amongst US companies engaged in the importation of American industrial relations, with only 14 per cent recognizing unions while 80 per cent of EU based companies recognized unions (Roche 2001). In an economy where ‘workplace change and innovation will be critical to Ireland’s future as a dynamic, inclusive knowledge economy3’ there is significant weight to arguments that American firms are less inclined to engage their workforces in forms of partnership and employee involvement in moments of organisational change (Roche, 2000).
This new conformance thesis also entails a simultaneous ‘spill over’ effect on indigenous firms who adopt increasingly the innovations and market strategies of the multinational sector in an effort to remain competitive as attitudes against union presence hardens across the board but remains relatively under-exposed due to centralised bargaining. Macroeconomic changes have led to a sharp detradionalisation of the industrial front inhabited by unions as multinational firms import business practices that redefine Irish industrial relations with tactics such as union substitionism, avoidance and new human resource methods.
The Heterogeneous Work Experience.
As globalisation becomes the buzzword of our time with its associated experience of a post-modernisation of the economy and traditional forms of work, employers here were also forced to adopt flexibility in order ‘to adapt more speedily to turbulent and competitive international markets (Treu, 1992, p. 509).’ Irish trade unions have been equally receptive to these dominant paradigms in celebrating flexible working arrangements (O’Hearn 1998, p104) through the social partnership process. O’Hearn (1998, p41) describes how ‘public illusion is often more important than reality in providing legitimacy to economic strategies’ - while multinational investment in Ireland did not directly lead to increases in employment, the economy is heavily reliant on them for economic output and growth. Since the mid 1990’s more jobs than in any other period of the Irish state’s short existence have been created in the services sector. The phenomenon of increased flexibility is linked to significant shifts in the patterns of employment during the Celtic Tiger period, as services came to dominate the provision of employment accounting for 64 per cent of jobs in 1999 (O’Hearn 2005, p41). This steady transformation to a reliance on the services sector, with a move from full time to part time and other atypical modes occurs in alongside the abandoning of the notion of full employment for the mass underemployment of a wider segment of the workforce.
The services sector is one traditionally characterized by the employment of youth4, women and increasingly migrants, three demographics exhibiting poor signs of unionization. 128, 000 women entered the workforce between 1996 and 20005 into jobs which were once well paid and almost exclusively male but now have become deskilled and pushed down the status hierarchy (Kennedy 2005). The once masculine norm of ‘a job for life’ is rapidly being conquered by the experience of non-standard work (Vosko 2000) leading to a broader ‘feminisation of employment’ across gender categories. Contractual flexibility and short term work undermines the initiative to join a union as work is no longer a life time commitment and the ‘continuous association of labour (Webb S and Web B 1920, p1)’ becomes irrelevant as people move between different modes of employment. The temporal change in experiences of work and the increased prevalence of shift work also impacts on union membership as the ‘different times at which people work, mean that there is often no-one around to represent the union, and to recruit members (Crouch, p448)’ with unions becoming a declining visible force on the proverbial ‘shop floor’ with lack of union membership more a symptom of a lack of 'opportunity than of predisposition (Stirling 2005, p5)'
Unions too have had little success in the organisation of migrant workers here, a group now representing a significant sector of a changed labour force - in 2002 between 40, 321 and 47,551 new work permits were granted to employers from outside the EU. Where disputes arose with employers and were brought before a Rights Commissioner in 2003 only 37 per cent of migrants had any form of representation, meanwhile at the Employment Appeals Tribunal trade unions represented a mere 6 per cent of cases6.
As Hardt and Negri allude, the shift to a services industry and flexibility carries with it a necessary change in the quality and nature of labour, as the “production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labour involved in this production as immaterial labor — that is, labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication (Hardt & Negri 2000, p290).” Returning to this tradition of Italian autonomism, structural changes within capitalism can be rooted within the refusal of the disciplinary regime of the Fordist era by the working class (Wright 2002). The rise of the services sector and atypical employment sees 'a labour market in which trade union membership was strong replaced with one in which it was traditionally weak (Stirling 2005, p3)'. Thus changes in capital’s organisational dynamic in themselves lead to new formations of class with identities distinct from traditional homogenous class structures where unions were dominant and now find themselves floundering on the rocks with penetration as low as 23 per cent7 in the private services sector.
Shifting Identities on Shifting Sands.
The conceptualisation of an erosion of homogeneity in the workplace and its effects on broader society has been touched on by a plethora of social theorists. Sharp changes in the economy have brought with them a process of dislocation and distortion in the way people identify and regard themselves in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, despite a standard hegemonic discourse celebrating structural changes in the Irish economy and its work practices. A significant amount of recent analysis has described how labour force and economic restructuring has impacted on the make up of traditional working class communities and the spatial dynamics of the contemporary urban Irish environment (Drudy &, 2000). The city increasingly becomes a locus of production in the knowledge economy, providing a technological infrastructure to the currents of the modern business world it pushes out traditional manufacturing further to its periphery echoing the global process of captialism’s 'spatial fixes (Silver 2003).' The city too pushes away and decomposes the traditional manufacturing working class so that it 'may find themselves in but not of the city, divorced from its new mainstream informational economy, and subsisting on a mélange of odd jobs, welfare cheques and the black economy (Hall 1996, p422)' leading to a considerable polarisation between various social groups and areas and undermining a significant traditional union support base.
The rise of a services industry dependent on high rates of consumption has led to the rise in the idea of the single non-associational consumer as a dominant mode of self-perception. Micheal O’Connell has charted the changing sharp modernisation processes that took place throughout the Celtic Tiger period. He describes a generation that has moved beyond the “moral monopoly” of Catholic teaching previously articulated by Inglis, towards a sense of individuality that articulates itself in the accumulation of material possessions rather than via any more internal sense of spiritual or personal fulfilment or in collective practices. As Coulter describes this cultural revolution in the Irish psyche and society at large is “conceived as having entailed a radical departure at some unspecified moment in the 1990’s (Coulter 2005, p14)”
Anne B. Ryan has described the emergence of two distinct groups, tied into two different discourses on work and time in the Celtic Tiger. One is governed by the idea that “there is no alternative” and the other she termed the “creative alternatives.” The TINA’s felt tied to the “hurried and fraught” work-earn-spend ethos promoted and fore grounded in mainstream commentaries in the varying Sunday lifestyle supplements and on a national TV schedule devoted to home improvement, fashion and mortgage advice. This group is tied to a fatalistic discourse of “reality” that sees them experiencing feelings of a lack control. Consequently they place the blame for time poverty, debt and financial insecurity on factors outside of their control despite operating within a belief system that privileges the “new essentials” and consumer goods that require two incomes and push the limits of personal finance to obtain them. This subservience to the commodity form has the effect of “conflating self and possessions, which makes it difficult for people to distinguish between want and need (Ryan 2005, p260).” 82 per cent of Irish workers now feel that their job requires them to work very hard, with 51 per cent complaining that they have to work under a great deal of pressure8. This idea of a lack of control rules out career breaks or a reduction in levels of spending to a more modest lifestyle. In effect it also rules out the critical reflection needed to open the possibilities that there is an alternative way of organising society and as Sennet puts it such an erosion of character dispels the possibilities of building long term institutions such as unions. The opposing tendency to this discourse is simply reduced to the role of a sub-altern voice and given little expression in the channels of mainstream society.
Beck’s work on the risk society formulated the idea of a boomerang effect that shattered traditional boundaries of class and nation, with ecological and technical risk becoming more socially diffuse. In his application of these theories of risk to the world of work he identifies how the “worker citizen” identity which was the foundation of 20th century societies, is equally becoming diffuse and replaced with a “project identity” in a process of detraditionalisaiton of social make up. With this analysis it’s not surprising that 78 per cent of union members feel loyalty to their union does not supersede loyalty to their work and 57 per cent of members speculate that they could work just as happily in a non-unionised firm9. The vision of a “chopped up” work time forming around flexibility and atypical employment echoes the concerns of Baumann who raises the idea of how it is now more constructive to speak of individual identity in the plural, consisting of a mish mash of past experiences and current commitments. Pessimistically he concludes that “nothing truly lasting could be reasonably hoped to be erected on this kind of shifting sand (Baumann 2001, p317).” One can only conclude that these shifting sands mitigate against the construction of a labour movement as we shift from an industrial society based on the organization of time around work to a post-industrial society based on difference and fragmentation in the experiences of how work, leisure and social life interact.
Compact With Reality?
A key thesis within the international literature on the trade union decline motif is that of a collapse of utopianism within the labour movement. This is the abandonment of any claims towards a transformative politics that can transcend capitalist social relations, an implicit acceptance of the employment regime and an ideological compact with the neo-liberal development model. In most mainstream accounts of industrial relations we are presented with a chronicle where the labour movement comes to maturity leaving behind conflict as a set of industrial rules emerge with pluralist industrial relations strategies evolving, with either side coming to recognise each others shared interest in the labour process (Roche Chapter 2, 1994). Allen has provided one of the foremost recent attempts to understand the decline of a critical voice in Irish unions within changing ideological schemas, rather than simply putting it down to an inevitable maturing process, in posing the question ‘where have all the unions gone?’ There have been dramatic changes in the language used in labour movement briefing documents, simple terms ‘like movement with its connotations of solidarity and common struggle, of a march towards a better society (Allen 2000, p103)’ have become redundant as the movement moves from ‘the clenched fist of confrontation to the open hand of co-operation.’
Social partnership has entailed a wide spread deregulation of virtually all aspects of the economy except in wages, with the unions participating in the National Competitive Council, described by the OECD as promoting ‘increased competition in energy, telecommunications, transport and many other areas.10’ The unions increasingly counterpoise a European social model to American neo-liberalism, on one had this sees them reject a traditional proletarian internationalism to confine themselves to the borders of ‘fortress Europe’ and equally it sees them managing the imposition of a work discipline suited to neo-liberal environments rather than challenging it. Equally the ‘uniformity of liberalisation’ contained within article 133 contains the potential to ride roughshod over the last remaining bastions of unionisation in the public service as the economy rushes to market flexibility.
Describing how ICTU’s influence at government level is in inverse proportion to its strength in the workplace, Allen focuses on the increased alienation of the union bureaucracy from the rank and file. In the social partnership agreements he sees this as a process of deliberate co-option by a state that has since the 1950’s showed an active interest in shaping trade unions to the interest of capital. This is most evident in the processes of how it has encouraged the centralisation of bargaining, a rationalisation of the union movement and the introduction of the Industrial Relations Act in 1990 limiting the repertoire of solidarity actions the movement can legally resort to, eroding the scope for rank and file union participation. Roche and Geary dismiss this emerging 'displaced activist thesis' by looking at neo-corportatist working practices in Aer Rianta and claiming they do little to alienate lay activists from union participation (Roche & Geary 2003). It is mistaken to make this judgement on the back of a study of a work arena with long established industrial organisations and a tradition of union participation in a large workplace.
The concept of the displaced activist does more to summon the notion of lay union members who may work in smaller firms or atypical work and have little contact with full time union officials engaged in centralised bargaining. The decline of autonomous decision making structures in unions has a more potentially alienating effect on fragmented employees in smaller workplaces, contributing to a displacement of lay members from participating in union contrary to the experiences of larger workplaces. Falling in behind this lack of workplace involvement in the collective structure of unions is the idea of an individualisation of class struggle, where the service providing unions take individual cases of unfair practice up and in the ‘modern moral economy they defend their legal rights as citizens (Bagguley)’ having moved beyond a reliance on the collective identity of class towards a reliance on the state for advancing the interests of members.
The collapse of the ‘clinched fist of confrontation’ and the decline of a labour movement utopianism is an important motif in the union decline thesis. The compact the labour movement has entered into with many of the core values of the Irish state and business leaders has had a remarkable effect in closing the space available to radical critiques of Irish neo-liberalism.11 It is undeniable that the idea of working class power and liberation based around that identity has had a huge effect on mobilisations and in building organisations over the past century, now as Silver has argued the very idea 'that there is no alternative has had a powerful demobilising impact on labour movements (Silver 2000, p16).’
The Fatalism of the Union Decline Thesis
Unwillingly echoing aspects of Marx’s theory of real subsumption, there is a huge fatalism in much of the analysis around trade union decline. If taken too far this simply reduces labour to an inactive component in the social relations of capitalism. Aronowitz identifies this in describing how ‘there is no counter logic of revolutionary upheaval within the theory, since subjectivity itself is under the rule of capital, is afforded no autonomous space (Aaronowitz 1992, p108)’. This one-sidedness echoes much of the critical Marxist school around the Frankfurt theorists, which focused on the apparent cultural domination of the working class and it is a one-sidedness that is apparent in much industrial sociology.
Pointing out a series of trends in recent industrial sociology, Ackroyd and Thompson describe how applications of problematic Foucaldian based post-modern schemas, grant active agency to a management wielding an overwhelming panoptical power over employees. A tradition of uncovering workplace misbehaviour and images of recalcitrant employees with forms of analysis that placed the active subjectivity of change in the workplace with the workforce, become increasingly replaced by a focus on the actions of the management of transnational capitalism as a class-for-itself. In an era that confuses the decline of one possible aspect of working class identity, namely trade union membership with the decline of social class, this theoretical fixation on management practices and the impact of global economic restructuring pushes aside forms of working class organisation existing outside institutionalised structures by simply closing its eyes to it. As they conclude researchers simply ‘have to put labour back in, by doing theory and research in such ways that it is possible to ‘see’ resistance and misbehaviour, and recognize that innovatory employee practices and informal organization will continue to subvert managerial regimes (Thompson and Ackroyd 1995, p629).’
With trade union decline in the west, many like Castells have rushed to claim that non-class-based identity movements are the only ‘potential subjects of the information age (Castells 1997, p360).’ But as Silver has pointed out it is impossible to escape the irony that early 20th Century observers of the structural transformations associated with Fordism were certain that these changes in production also spelt the death of the labour movement (Silver 2003, p6). The working class, according to Antonio Negri (1988: p209), is a ‘dynamic subject, an antagonistic force tending toward its own independent identity.’ 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, this is equally true of much of the union decline thesis. Hymann describes how the current crisis of trade unionism is more a crisis of a particular model of trade unionism, one which he says is based on the ‘mechanical solidarity’ associated with images of a homogenous class experience. This was a form of trade union identity suited to one particular historical moment, one rooted in a vision of twentieth century trade unionism that “tended to reflect and replicate on one hand the discipline and standardization imposed by ‘Fordist’ mass production12” in both its aesthetic and organizing structures. Just as the archetypal proletarian identity passed from 19th century craft workers to the iconography of heavy industry, it was inevitable that the model of unionism based on this set of identities set into decline as new formations of class and economic organization became more asserted as society passed into a new phase of post-industrial organisation.
Trade unionism is based on the construction of a common identity around which solidarity is expressed, the union model developed in the Fordist era may have helped create a reality approximating myth in organizing stable industrial bases but structural changes in economic organization and how class expresses itself demands a new form of strategic thinking and a new ‘mythic solidarity’ around which class identity can assert itself. This project will involve surpassing a narrow understanding of what it is to be ‘working class’ with its 'privileging of the traditional wage worker (Waterman 2005, p202)’ towards constructing an expression of class interests that can accommodate the fractured experiences of shifting identities on shifting sands in new collectivities.
1 http://www.cso.ie/releasespublications/documents/labour_market/current/qnhsunionmembership.pdf
2 Richard Hyman Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalization? (http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/hyman2.html)
3 Working to Our Advantage: A National Workplace Strategy. Report of the Forum On The Workplace of The Future.
4 Only 27.8 per cent of under 25’s are union members. See O’Connell et al. ‘The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employee’s Views and Experiences’ Forum on the Workplace Research Series, number 2.
5 Central Statistics Office. Quarterly National Household Survey First Quarter 2001 (Dublin, CSO 2001)
6 Migrant Workers and Access to Statutory Dispute Resolution Agencies. Labour Relations Commision. (October 2005) p16
7 O’Connell et al. ‘The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employee’s Views and Experiences’ Forum on the Workplace Research Series, number 2. p70
8 ‘The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employee’s Views and Experiences’ Forum on the Workplace Research Series, number 2. p39
9 Ibid p7
10 OECD, Regulatory Reform In Ireland. (Paris OECD, p2001) p27
11 See Allen 2000 for a discussion of the limited space offered within SIPTU structures for articulating opposition to the Partnership 2000 agreement.
12 http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/hyman2.html
The future for the Irish trade union movement is far from certain. Without ignoring the historical complexities and national contexts of specific labour movements, it remains possible to sketch a pattern of shared experience across the European trade union movement (Fairbrother & Griffin 2002; Croucher & Brewster 1998). Trade unions experienced a period of relative stabilisation in the years after the Second World War. An institutionalisation of class conflict enabled a degree of input into national economic affairs unprecedented in their history. Despite this recent extensive economic restructuring in the era of globalisation resulted in decreased membership densities and a decline of participation in the various movements. This downward slope in unionisation figures was considered most severe in the United Kingdom, with membership of TUC unions declining to less than a third of the workforce by 1995. In a country where the labour movement played an often dramatic and defining role in the unfolding of history and culture, this fall from a historic peak of over 13.2 million unionised workers in 1979 to just 7.85 million by 1998 (Fairbrother 2002, chapter 3) suggests a massive reversal of fortunes and a hugely declining power base.
This sharp rupture with historical precedent in the mid 20th century has led to much investigation, commentary and analysis in the fields of industrial relations and labour process theory. As broadly mentioned above, the UK is not alone in its experience. Irish unions too have seen a comparable reversal in membership statistics in the past two decades. There has been what on the surface appears like a numerical increase, but when we consider an overall unprecedented spurt in employment growth in the 1990s we are left with a net effect of decline that has yet to be reversed. In a country increasingly delineated through its much vaunted globalised economy, this process of continuous trade union decline since the early 1980’s echoes the experience not just of the UK, but of many of our European counter-parts.
Firstly the historical emergence of the Irish trade union movement will be examined very briefly to sketch the broad contours of its rise and present state of decline. The chapter will then move to examine in much more depth reasons for union decline in the past two decades, a period where Irish society went through a series of vast social, cultural and economic changes associated with the term ‘Celtic Tiger’. Finally the chapter will conclude by commenting on an uneasy fatalism within parts of the union decline theses, one that privileges unions as a site of labour collectivity and thus obscures the often localised and informal contestations of power that can occur within workplaces.
Brief Historical Contours.
Conceived to safeguard the welfare of those in a particular trade regardless of status within it and to confer civil liberties, the Irish Merchant Guild was founded in the 1170’s. By the mid Eighteenth century there was a massive reduction in the role played by the Irish Merchant Guild, as new social and economic forces washed away a previous ability to regulate aspects of production and working conditions in the relative autonomy of pre-industrialized production. Increasingly faced with a dwindling economic role they became more important for their political role in conferring voting rights in sectarian municipal and parliamentary elections. Preoccupation with political representation and a concentration of production and ownership led to a scenario where the guilds no longer represented the interests of a whole trade but an emerging dominant class within them as ‘great differences of degree concealed within the term artisan’ (Thompson 1980, p257) became apparent. In 1833 among a bricklaying guild of 104 members only 39 were engaged in the trade and only seven were journeymen. Prior even to their abolition in 1846, the roots of a modern labour movement was being sown as combinations of journeymen began to assert themselves against their masters, providing self-organised measures of social security in times of illness and unemployment while also advancing concerns regarding the conditions of their working day.
Arising from early labour disputes, these relatively open yet underground combinations faced a series of hap-hazard measures of repression from the Irish parliament dating back to 1729 (Boyd 1985, Chapters 1 and 2). The first significant recognition of working class combination as a political force by the Irish parliament came with legislation in 1780, which sharply prefigured the later 1799 British combination act extended here after the Act of Union. This legislation provided a legal frame work for fines for violence and actions arising from unionisation and collective bargaining. Opposition to it resulted in a massive mobilisation of 20,000 skilled workers in the Phoenix Park. This was an event that contributed to a shared sense of confidence and momentum ensuring legislation would do little to stem a rising early labour movement entered into a period of consolidation throughout the 19th century. From about 1850 on a British model of unionism based on the organisation of skilled workers and a labour aristocracy replaced the persistent radicalism of earlier years, echoing the neighboring decline of the charterist movement (Boyd 1985, Chapters 6). By the 1880’s cross-industry trades councils concentrating mainly on skilled craft workers were established in major towns like Cork, Belfast and Dublin and after a history of affiliation to the British TUC, the Irish TUC was founded in 1894 (Fergus and D’Arcy, 1988).
Histories of the early 20th century accord Larkin and Connolly with the importation of syndicalism to Ireland. Syndicalism contained a radical critique of capitalism as a social and economic system and as such was ideologically motivated to organise the ‘one big union’ to form the basis of an ‘industrial republic’ to ‘crack the shell of the political state and step into its place (Connolly 1908).’ Syndicalism invigorated the labour movement in Ireland with a new focus on the organisation of unskilled labour. This model resulted in a spurt in the growth of union organisation leading to a series of intense labour disputes in the maritime economy, ranging from the Belfast dock strike of 1907 then later in Cork and Wexford. This first wave of militancy would end with the infamous 1913 lock out, a dispute that almost pushed the ITGWU, the union most sharply associated with these early utopian years into dormancy.
This era of union growth can be split into two waves of radicalism. The first wave of radicalism occurred during a period of industrial revival but a second wave of radicalisation from 1917-1920 developed as a result of the intersection of a number of other factors. Union growth occurred against a backdrop of war time shortages, wage suppression and employer resistance to unions. An economic boom in agriculture developed as a result of compulsory tillage to counteract food shortages. Although important in the first wave of radicalism, the role of dislocation in the passage from agrarian life to urbanisation, poor living conditions and subjection to industrial work discipline can be downplayed as union growth took off in the face of national revolution. The dramatic organisation of farm labour accounted for just under 30 per cent of ITGWU members in the period (Roche 1994, p17). Agrarian experiences of White Boy or Land League collective action exerted an influence in accounting for geographical patterns of collective action in the period. Popular militancy and mobilisation (Kostick 1996; Yeates 2000, p579) during the war of independence too played a role in growth as unions became associated with national martyrdom after Connolly and the ICA’s involvement in the 1916 rebellion.
The movement continued to play a massive role in the conscription crisis of 1918, including a one day general strike and the blacking of military supplies and personal for transport throughout the Anglo-Irish war. At its peak this period witnessed a series of land seizures, factory occupations and short lived soviets that coincided with a European working class insurgency.
Despite the membership of unions affiliated to the Irish Congress of Trade Unions rising from about 30,000 in 1894 to 250,000 in 1920 (Roche 1994, p19) there was no ‘spiral of politicisation (Roche 1994, p25) affecting labour during these ‘emancipatory moments (Waterman, Interactivist Exchange)’ due to its short intensity. Instead of contributing to the engrained social democratic or communist traditions that arose as a result of post-war labour radicalism in Europe, these militant years served to strengthen Irish nationalism. A process deepened by the deference exhibited by the labour movement leadership to the nationalist politics of Sinn Fein in the 1918 general election. As a result Irish political life would became structured along divisions between nationalist parties. The consolidation of a state hostile to working class militancy and willing to confront it with troops as in the case of the 1923 farm labourers strike (Fergus and D’Arcy 1988, p7; Kostick 1996; Roche 1994, p139) and a downturn in agriculture and trade contributed to union decline as a once radical vision blurred in maintaining status and differentials amongst sectors, rather than tackling the broader social and political issues that had animated the concerns of the previous decade (Gunnigle, McMahon and Fitzgerald 1999, p12). Broader global economic depression and low morale saw membership of congress fall from 190,000 in 1922 to 92,000 in 1929, a process underscored by the dramatic collapse and splitting of the ITGWU due to a quarrel between charismatic communist Larkin and cautious bureaucrat O’Brien (Fergus and D’Arcy 1988, p7) as a conservative nationalist and collaborationist politics obscured by the Irish revolution came to the fore.
Fianna Fail with support from the Labour party were more conciliatory in office from 1932 on, exhibiting hints of corporatist tendencies in the state’s relationship with the unions that slightly owed to the pressure of a Catholic vocationalism finding expression in the politics of Cumann Na Gaedhal. The thirties were an era of broad protectionist economic measures used to increase the self sufficiency of the burgeoning state and encourage the growth of native industry leading to increased employment with unions pushing for higher wages and witnessing increased membership growth (Roche 1994, p141).
The onset of the Second World War and its associated supplies shortage contributed to a decline in industrial output of a quarter. Agriculture still dominated with industry accounting for just 17 per cent of employment as late as 1946, enterprise was characterised by small establishments and only forty businesses outside the state sector employed over 500 workers. Divisions that had emerged between British based union and Irish ones during the rise of nationalism led to further stagnation and a split in congress in 1945. The post war recovery led to a 70 per cent rise in both strike and union membership, but this was a period where economic growth concealed the limitations of the protectionist years and a recession hit in the 1950’s (Gunnigle et al 1999, p12). Already by the mid-forties, Lemass’ critique of protectionism was leading him towards the instigation of major changes in industrial relations (Roche 1994, p147) encouraging a rationalisation of union structures in the wake of the 1941 Trade Union Act and the setting up of the Labour Court in 1946. With Keynesian inspired intervention in the economy, rates of union membership rose 7 per cent through out the 1950’s with unions resigning themselves to consolidation rather than militancy during a period of economic decline.
By the 1960’s significant state effort was being poured into attracting foreign investment, with the Industrial Development Authority creating grants as incentives for setting up here, increased organisation of white collar workers contributed to a density rate of 57 per cent by 1970 (Roche 1994, p153). With rising living standards and inflation throughout much of the sixties, wage costs and industrial disputes were seen to jeopardise Irish competitiveness in attracting multinational investment. From about the mid-1970’s the terminology of ‘social partnership’ began to describe the developing tri-partite industrial bargaining systems which began to cover a wide range of social policy in a series of national pay agreements from 1971 on. By 1978, industrial output reached two and a half times the 1926 level with unionisation rates reaching 70 per cent and strike action doubling (Gunnigle, McMahon and Fitzgerald 1999, p13). Unofficial strike action, a drift to shop steward power and a growing movement of protest against the taxation system by PAYE workers in 1979 threatened to disrupt developing corporate working relations between the state, unions and employers and by the end of the decade formal tri-partism was concluded.
The eighties were characterized by a set of acute problems facing the Irish economy. The national debt, outward migration and unemployment figures spiraled and a developing employers offensive of ‘macho management (Gunnigle, McMahon and Fitzgerald 1999, p14).’ took off amidst recession leading to a number of dramatic defeats in militant workforces such as Rowntrees. This period of economic despair and the erosion of the labour movements confidence heavily impacted on trade union membership among the workforce, with a fall from a historic high of 61.31 per cent in 1980 to 57.10 per cent in 1990 being described as ‘the most serious and sustained declines in membership since the 1920’s (Roche and Ashmore, 2002)’ with 87,000 members leaving the various organizations. This created the conditions for a ‘new realism’ amongst the bureaucracy of the union movement as it adopted the concerns of the Irish state’s development project. This process set the stage for social partnership as we know it today (Allen 2000, p 113-114) with the introduction of the Process for National Recovery in 1987. This process of ‘social consensus’ has been described as a ‘crucial ingredient (Sweeney 1998, p90)’ in the process of Irelands recent economic resurgence.
With the sustained economic boom of the Celtic Tiger, unions experienced a revival to a membership density comparable to the early 1980’s. This strengthening of density however had not kept pace with a growth in employment in the overall workforce, meaning that in real terms net union density has in fact exhibited all the continued signs of decline. In an era where unions exert more political influence than ever before, the levels of membership and capability for collective action forming the base of this power, is undergoing dramatic erosion. Data on unionisation published by the Central Statistics Office1 as recently as September 2005 confirms this, indicating that just 35 per cent of employees in Ireland are members of a union compared with 46 per cent 10 years ago. Sharp differences of membership rates are emerging between the public and private sector with a particularly foreboding trend of non membership among under 25 year olds.
The Union Decline Thesis.
There is a massive convergence of focus amongst academics looking at the phenomenon of union decline. Fairbrother and Griffin highlight the shared concerns in much of these discussions. The various union decline theses revolve around an axis composed of structural shifts in the economy, changes in employer ideologies, shifting relations between states and unions and the changing demands and composition of employees (Peter Fairbrother & Gerard Griffin 2002, p7). Roche identifies three major factors affecting the trend of unionisation in Ireland (Roche 1994, Chapter 3) ranging from cyclical to institutional and structural influences. Cyclical influences arise from the business cycle, unions may become positively associated with rising wages and living standards or in the case of inflation employees may increasingly turn to them to maintain a standard of living they have become accustomed to. Periods of high employment or labour market ‘tightness’ also affect the ability of employers to retaliate in the wake of unionisation while ‘slackness’ may threaten union members’ employment. Institutional influences range from state policy on industrial relations, the ideological motivation of employers to the degree of decentralisation in bargaining. Hyman2 postulates that the crisis of trade unionism has three underlying characteristics. These are decreased homogeneity in the working population including differentiation between unions, an intensified restructuring and deregulation that can be conceptualized through globalization and the erosion of egalitarian or utopian currents and commitments within the over all labor movement. This chapter will now turn its focus to applying aspects of these theories of union decline to the Irish context over the past two decades. By using a variety of social research and analysis it will deepen an understanding of the processes through which macroeconomic change; the rise of heterogeneous employment; changing employee identities and individualization and a union movement that has refused to engage in the creation of alternatives have contributed to an overall decline in the Irish union movement.
The Effects Of Macroeconomic Changes.
Robust and deep rooted changes in the Irish economy became apparent with economic resurgence from the mid 1990’s on, a process confirmed when Ireland found itself inhabiting poll position on a ‘globalisaiton index’ in the US Foreign Policy magazine by 2001. The index was based on a series of factors ranging from levels of inward multinational investment, to travel and communications - all used to identify the degree of global economic integration (Fagan 2003, p110). Reliance on multinationals for industrial investment had being developing from the late sixties (Hearn 1998, p40). In 1995 Ireland replaced the UK as the main European site of US electronic hardware investment with over 400 US firms employing 50, 000 people and with rates of investment going back to these firms at three times the EU average from 1983 – 1994. The country now attracts up to one quarter of all US direct investment for the EU with a total of over 1,000 multinationals employing over 100,000 people in areas as varied as electronics, software and pharmaceuticals (Gunnigle et al 1999, p 404-405).
In the construction of ‘hagiographies (Coulter 2005, p10)’ around the growth of the Celtic Tiger and the sudden attractiveness of the Irish economy on the global market, popular discourse hangs on a series of definitive breaks with tradition, rolling in with the more recent ideological acceptance of neo-liberalism and astute policy making at the level of government dating back to Lemass. These factors are seen as arising from a mainly indigenous ingenuity; the introduction of free schooling created a highly educated workforce; the adoption of a variety of cultural values associated with modernity; fiscal prudence in the eighties; economic deregulation; low corporate taxation; industrial compromise through social partnership and the efforts of the IDA all contributed to a stable macroeconomic environment attracting significant foreign led investment.
More critically engaged (Hearn 1998; Allen 2000) analysis of Ireland’s economic renaissance contradicts this prevailing chorus of appreciation for the decisions of past Irish elites. These critics home in on a series of contradictions and the significant role played by a turn around in the US economy after industrial restructuring and resultant investment in the high tech sector from the seventies on. The global backdrop to a rapidly changing Irish economy is made up of a significant shift from fordist to post-fordist models of production. This process, characterized by the informatisation of production, involves a move from an economy ideally based on mass production to a post-modern knowledge economy defined by production premised on the manipulation of signs and symbols in a network form of capitalism (Hardt & Negri 2001). With the changing industrial composition of capitalism, American high tech companies sought a bridgehead into the significant European market. Ireland offered numerous advantages to companies emblematic of this trend such as Intel. With a low rate of corporation tax of 10 per cent until 2002 (a rate undercutting the rest of Europe), a young work force hirable at rates once standing at the bottom of the EU and a strong pro-business political climate with broad acceptance of the governments economic strategy by the unions ensuring relative industrial peace (Allen 2000, pp23 -27).
One aspect of the growth associated with this foreign direct investment is a reliance on the performance of the US economy, ripples of which could be seen with the IDA’s announcements in 2001 of record job losses in TNC’s concentrated in the IT sector and many of the symbols of the Irish industrial boom such as Motorola and Gateway (O’Hearn 1998, p39). With an economy highly dependent on foreign investment the Irish state is now heavily tied into the economic discourse of neo-liberalism, with an emphasis on integration into the European market, deregulation of the economy, the creation of a flexible labour market and the handing over of areas of life previously exempt from market control to the market. In this model of social transformation, the linear productive model of the assembly line has been replaced by the networked design, where control can be exercised at a distance and production is effectively fluid and capable of being uprooted from specific geographical locations in response to economic decline, labour organisation or state intervention. This process has undermined significantly both state sovereignty and the labour movement’s ability to act as a “major source of social cohesion and workers representation (Castells 1997, p354)” as the fate of multinational enterprises in Ireland becomes determined in the board rooms of corporate executives rather than in the cabinet (Roche 1995, p40).
Traditionally multinationals were believed to conform to the industrial relations models in a host country. Since the adoption of a ‘union neutral’ stance by the IDA in attracting multinational investment, much analysis has been advanced that overturns this ‘conformance thesis’ (Roche and Geary, 1995) instead emphasizing how multinationals now redefine the patterns and traditions of industrial relations in a country. The level of this effect have been the source of much dispute (T. Turner et al) but there is a prevailing consensus, even among those dismissing it, that amongst employees and even unions for 'Irish operations to remain viable, they must move up their corporation’s ‘value chain’, through engaging in higher value added activities, and concurrently improve their competitiveness (Clark et al, p513)'. The reliance on foreign investment leads to facilitation of an American led ‘non-union’ approach in the host business model that owes more to the political experience of years of US regonomics than the recent rhetoric of social partnership in Ireland.
An overview of firms established at Greenfield sites in Ireland from 1987 to 1997 found that 65 per cent of firms could be classified as non union (Gunnigle et al, 2002). This phenomenon was most prevalent amongst US companies engaged in the importation of American industrial relations, with only 14 per cent recognizing unions while 80 per cent of EU based companies recognized unions (Roche 2001). In an economy where ‘workplace change and innovation will be critical to Ireland’s future as a dynamic, inclusive knowledge economy3’ there is significant weight to arguments that American firms are less inclined to engage their workforces in forms of partnership and employee involvement in moments of organisational change (Roche, 2000).
This new conformance thesis also entails a simultaneous ‘spill over’ effect on indigenous firms who adopt increasingly the innovations and market strategies of the multinational sector in an effort to remain competitive as attitudes against union presence hardens across the board but remains relatively under-exposed due to centralised bargaining. Macroeconomic changes have led to a sharp detradionalisation of the industrial front inhabited by unions as multinational firms import business practices that redefine Irish industrial relations with tactics such as union substitionism, avoidance and new human resource methods.
The Heterogeneous Work Experience.
As globalisation becomes the buzzword of our time with its associated experience of a post-modernisation of the economy and traditional forms of work, employers here were also forced to adopt flexibility in order ‘to adapt more speedily to turbulent and competitive international markets (Treu, 1992, p. 509).’ Irish trade unions have been equally receptive to these dominant paradigms in celebrating flexible working arrangements (O’Hearn 1998, p104) through the social partnership process. O’Hearn (1998, p41) describes how ‘public illusion is often more important than reality in providing legitimacy to economic strategies’ - while multinational investment in Ireland did not directly lead to increases in employment, the economy is heavily reliant on them for economic output and growth. Since the mid 1990’s more jobs than in any other period of the Irish state’s short existence have been created in the services sector. The phenomenon of increased flexibility is linked to significant shifts in the patterns of employment during the Celtic Tiger period, as services came to dominate the provision of employment accounting for 64 per cent of jobs in 1999 (O’Hearn 2005, p41). This steady transformation to a reliance on the services sector, with a move from full time to part time and other atypical modes occurs in alongside the abandoning of the notion of full employment for the mass underemployment of a wider segment of the workforce.
The services sector is one traditionally characterized by the employment of youth4, women and increasingly migrants, three demographics exhibiting poor signs of unionization. 128, 000 women entered the workforce between 1996 and 20005 into jobs which were once well paid and almost exclusively male but now have become deskilled and pushed down the status hierarchy (Kennedy 2005). The once masculine norm of ‘a job for life’ is rapidly being conquered by the experience of non-standard work (Vosko 2000) leading to a broader ‘feminisation of employment’ across gender categories. Contractual flexibility and short term work undermines the initiative to join a union as work is no longer a life time commitment and the ‘continuous association of labour (Webb S and Web B 1920, p1)’ becomes irrelevant as people move between different modes of employment. The temporal change in experiences of work and the increased prevalence of shift work also impacts on union membership as the ‘different times at which people work, mean that there is often no-one around to represent the union, and to recruit members (Crouch, p448)’ with unions becoming a declining visible force on the proverbial ‘shop floor’ with lack of union membership more a symptom of a lack of 'opportunity than of predisposition (Stirling 2005, p5)'
Unions too have had little success in the organisation of migrant workers here, a group now representing a significant sector of a changed labour force - in 2002 between 40, 321 and 47,551 new work permits were granted to employers from outside the EU. Where disputes arose with employers and were brought before a Rights Commissioner in 2003 only 37 per cent of migrants had any form of representation, meanwhile at the Employment Appeals Tribunal trade unions represented a mere 6 per cent of cases6.
As Hardt and Negri allude, the shift to a services industry and flexibility carries with it a necessary change in the quality and nature of labour, as the “production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labour involved in this production as immaterial labor — that is, labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication (Hardt & Negri 2000, p290).” Returning to this tradition of Italian autonomism, structural changes within capitalism can be rooted within the refusal of the disciplinary regime of the Fordist era by the working class (Wright 2002). The rise of the services sector and atypical employment sees 'a labour market in which trade union membership was strong replaced with one in which it was traditionally weak (Stirling 2005, p3)'. Thus changes in capital’s organisational dynamic in themselves lead to new formations of class with identities distinct from traditional homogenous class structures where unions were dominant and now find themselves floundering on the rocks with penetration as low as 23 per cent7 in the private services sector.
Shifting Identities on Shifting Sands.
The conceptualisation of an erosion of homogeneity in the workplace and its effects on broader society has been touched on by a plethora of social theorists. Sharp changes in the economy have brought with them a process of dislocation and distortion in the way people identify and regard themselves in the wake of the Celtic Tiger, despite a standard hegemonic discourse celebrating structural changes in the Irish economy and its work practices. A significant amount of recent analysis has described how labour force and economic restructuring has impacted on the make up of traditional working class communities and the spatial dynamics of the contemporary urban Irish environment (Drudy &, 2000). The city increasingly becomes a locus of production in the knowledge economy, providing a technological infrastructure to the currents of the modern business world it pushes out traditional manufacturing further to its periphery echoing the global process of captialism’s 'spatial fixes (Silver 2003).' The city too pushes away and decomposes the traditional manufacturing working class so that it 'may find themselves in but not of the city, divorced from its new mainstream informational economy, and subsisting on a mélange of odd jobs, welfare cheques and the black economy (Hall 1996, p422)' leading to a considerable polarisation between various social groups and areas and undermining a significant traditional union support base.
The rise of a services industry dependent on high rates of consumption has led to the rise in the idea of the single non-associational consumer as a dominant mode of self-perception. Micheal O’Connell has charted the changing sharp modernisation processes that took place throughout the Celtic Tiger period. He describes a generation that has moved beyond the “moral monopoly” of Catholic teaching previously articulated by Inglis, towards a sense of individuality that articulates itself in the accumulation of material possessions rather than via any more internal sense of spiritual or personal fulfilment or in collective practices. As Coulter describes this cultural revolution in the Irish psyche and society at large is “conceived as having entailed a radical departure at some unspecified moment in the 1990’s (Coulter 2005, p14)”
Anne B. Ryan has described the emergence of two distinct groups, tied into two different discourses on work and time in the Celtic Tiger. One is governed by the idea that “there is no alternative” and the other she termed the “creative alternatives.” The TINA’s felt tied to the “hurried and fraught” work-earn-spend ethos promoted and fore grounded in mainstream commentaries in the varying Sunday lifestyle supplements and on a national TV schedule devoted to home improvement, fashion and mortgage advice. This group is tied to a fatalistic discourse of “reality” that sees them experiencing feelings of a lack control. Consequently they place the blame for time poverty, debt and financial insecurity on factors outside of their control despite operating within a belief system that privileges the “new essentials” and consumer goods that require two incomes and push the limits of personal finance to obtain them. This subservience to the commodity form has the effect of “conflating self and possessions, which makes it difficult for people to distinguish between want and need (Ryan 2005, p260).” 82 per cent of Irish workers now feel that their job requires them to work very hard, with 51 per cent complaining that they have to work under a great deal of pressure8. This idea of a lack of control rules out career breaks or a reduction in levels of spending to a more modest lifestyle. In effect it also rules out the critical reflection needed to open the possibilities that there is an alternative way of organising society and as Sennet puts it such an erosion of character dispels the possibilities of building long term institutions such as unions. The opposing tendency to this discourse is simply reduced to the role of a sub-altern voice and given little expression in the channels of mainstream society.
Beck’s work on the risk society formulated the idea of a boomerang effect that shattered traditional boundaries of class and nation, with ecological and technical risk becoming more socially diffuse. In his application of these theories of risk to the world of work he identifies how the “worker citizen” identity which was the foundation of 20th century societies, is equally becoming diffuse and replaced with a “project identity” in a process of detraditionalisaiton of social make up. With this analysis it’s not surprising that 78 per cent of union members feel loyalty to their union does not supersede loyalty to their work and 57 per cent of members speculate that they could work just as happily in a non-unionised firm9. The vision of a “chopped up” work time forming around flexibility and atypical employment echoes the concerns of Baumann who raises the idea of how it is now more constructive to speak of individual identity in the plural, consisting of a mish mash of past experiences and current commitments. Pessimistically he concludes that “nothing truly lasting could be reasonably hoped to be erected on this kind of shifting sand (Baumann 2001, p317).” One can only conclude that these shifting sands mitigate against the construction of a labour movement as we shift from an industrial society based on the organization of time around work to a post-industrial society based on difference and fragmentation in the experiences of how work, leisure and social life interact.
Compact With Reality?
A key thesis within the international literature on the trade union decline motif is that of a collapse of utopianism within the labour movement. This is the abandonment of any claims towards a transformative politics that can transcend capitalist social relations, an implicit acceptance of the employment regime and an ideological compact with the neo-liberal development model. In most mainstream accounts of industrial relations we are presented with a chronicle where the labour movement comes to maturity leaving behind conflict as a set of industrial rules emerge with pluralist industrial relations strategies evolving, with either side coming to recognise each others shared interest in the labour process (Roche Chapter 2, 1994). Allen has provided one of the foremost recent attempts to understand the decline of a critical voice in Irish unions within changing ideological schemas, rather than simply putting it down to an inevitable maturing process, in posing the question ‘where have all the unions gone?’ There have been dramatic changes in the language used in labour movement briefing documents, simple terms ‘like movement with its connotations of solidarity and common struggle, of a march towards a better society (Allen 2000, p103)’ have become redundant as the movement moves from ‘the clenched fist of confrontation to the open hand of co-operation.’
Social partnership has entailed a wide spread deregulation of virtually all aspects of the economy except in wages, with the unions participating in the National Competitive Council, described by the OECD as promoting ‘increased competition in energy, telecommunications, transport and many other areas.10’ The unions increasingly counterpoise a European social model to American neo-liberalism, on one had this sees them reject a traditional proletarian internationalism to confine themselves to the borders of ‘fortress Europe’ and equally it sees them managing the imposition of a work discipline suited to neo-liberal environments rather than challenging it. Equally the ‘uniformity of liberalisation’ contained within article 133 contains the potential to ride roughshod over the last remaining bastions of unionisation in the public service as the economy rushes to market flexibility.
Describing how ICTU’s influence at government level is in inverse proportion to its strength in the workplace, Allen focuses on the increased alienation of the union bureaucracy from the rank and file. In the social partnership agreements he sees this as a process of deliberate co-option by a state that has since the 1950’s showed an active interest in shaping trade unions to the interest of capital. This is most evident in the processes of how it has encouraged the centralisation of bargaining, a rationalisation of the union movement and the introduction of the Industrial Relations Act in 1990 limiting the repertoire of solidarity actions the movement can legally resort to, eroding the scope for rank and file union participation. Roche and Geary dismiss this emerging 'displaced activist thesis' by looking at neo-corportatist working practices in Aer Rianta and claiming they do little to alienate lay activists from union participation (Roche & Geary 2003). It is mistaken to make this judgement on the back of a study of a work arena with long established industrial organisations and a tradition of union participation in a large workplace.
The concept of the displaced activist does more to summon the notion of lay union members who may work in smaller firms or atypical work and have little contact with full time union officials engaged in centralised bargaining. The decline of autonomous decision making structures in unions has a more potentially alienating effect on fragmented employees in smaller workplaces, contributing to a displacement of lay members from participating in union contrary to the experiences of larger workplaces. Falling in behind this lack of workplace involvement in the collective structure of unions is the idea of an individualisation of class struggle, where the service providing unions take individual cases of unfair practice up and in the ‘modern moral economy they defend their legal rights as citizens (Bagguley)’ having moved beyond a reliance on the collective identity of class towards a reliance on the state for advancing the interests of members.
The collapse of the ‘clinched fist of confrontation’ and the decline of a labour movement utopianism is an important motif in the union decline thesis. The compact the labour movement has entered into with many of the core values of the Irish state and business leaders has had a remarkable effect in closing the space available to radical critiques of Irish neo-liberalism.11 It is undeniable that the idea of working class power and liberation based around that identity has had a huge effect on mobilisations and in building organisations over the past century, now as Silver has argued the very idea 'that there is no alternative has had a powerful demobilising impact on labour movements (Silver 2000, p16).’
The Fatalism of the Union Decline Thesis
Unwillingly echoing aspects of Marx’s theory of real subsumption, there is a huge fatalism in much of the analysis around trade union decline. If taken too far this simply reduces labour to an inactive component in the social relations of capitalism. Aronowitz identifies this in describing how ‘there is no counter logic of revolutionary upheaval within the theory, since subjectivity itself is under the rule of capital, is afforded no autonomous space (Aaronowitz 1992, p108)’. This one-sidedness echoes much of the critical Marxist school around the Frankfurt theorists, which focused on the apparent cultural domination of the working class and it is a one-sidedness that is apparent in much industrial sociology.
Pointing out a series of trends in recent industrial sociology, Ackroyd and Thompson describe how applications of problematic Foucaldian based post-modern schemas, grant active agency to a management wielding an overwhelming panoptical power over employees. A tradition of uncovering workplace misbehaviour and images of recalcitrant employees with forms of analysis that placed the active subjectivity of change in the workplace with the workforce, become increasingly replaced by a focus on the actions of the management of transnational capitalism as a class-for-itself. In an era that confuses the decline of one possible aspect of working class identity, namely trade union membership with the decline of social class, this theoretical fixation on management practices and the impact of global economic restructuring pushes aside forms of working class organisation existing outside institutionalised structures by simply closing its eyes to it. As they conclude researchers simply ‘have to put labour back in, by doing theory and research in such ways that it is possible to ‘see’ resistance and misbehaviour, and recognize that innovatory employee practices and informal organization will continue to subvert managerial regimes (Thompson and Ackroyd 1995, p629).’
With trade union decline in the west, many like Castells have rushed to claim that non-class-based identity movements are the only ‘potential subjects of the information age (Castells 1997, p360).’ But as Silver has pointed out it is impossible to escape the irony that early 20th Century observers of the structural transformations associated with Fordism were certain that these changes in production also spelt the death of the labour movement (Silver 2003, p6). The working class, according to Antonio Negri (1988: p209), is a ‘dynamic subject, an antagonistic force tending toward its own independent identity.’ 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, this is equally true of much of the union decline thesis. Hymann describes how the current crisis of trade unionism is more a crisis of a particular model of trade unionism, one which he says is based on the ‘mechanical solidarity’ associated with images of a homogenous class experience. This was a form of trade union identity suited to one particular historical moment, one rooted in a vision of twentieth century trade unionism that “tended to reflect and replicate on one hand the discipline and standardization imposed by ‘Fordist’ mass production12” in both its aesthetic and organizing structures. Just as the archetypal proletarian identity passed from 19th century craft workers to the iconography of heavy industry, it was inevitable that the model of unionism based on this set of identities set into decline as new formations of class and economic organization became more asserted as society passed into a new phase of post-industrial organisation.
Trade unionism is based on the construction of a common identity around which solidarity is expressed, the union model developed in the Fordist era may have helped create a reality approximating myth in organizing stable industrial bases but structural changes in economic organization and how class expresses itself demands a new form of strategic thinking and a new ‘mythic solidarity’ around which class identity can assert itself. This project will involve surpassing a narrow understanding of what it is to be ‘working class’ with its 'privileging of the traditional wage worker (Waterman 2005, p202)’ towards constructing an expression of class interests that can accommodate the fractured experiences of shifting identities on shifting sands in new collectivities.
1 http://www.cso.ie/releasespublications/documents/labour_market/current/qnhsunionmembership.pdf
2 Richard Hyman Imagined Solidarities: Can Trade Unions Resist Globalization? (http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/hyman2.html)
3 Working to Our Advantage: A National Workplace Strategy. Report of the Forum On The Workplace of The Future.
4 Only 27.8 per cent of under 25’s are union members. See O’Connell et al. ‘The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employee’s Views and Experiences’ Forum on the Workplace Research Series, number 2.
5 Central Statistics Office. Quarterly National Household Survey First Quarter 2001 (Dublin, CSO 2001)
6 Migrant Workers and Access to Statutory Dispute Resolution Agencies. Labour Relations Commision. (October 2005) p16
7 O’Connell et al. ‘The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employee’s Views and Experiences’ Forum on the Workplace Research Series, number 2. p70
8 ‘The Changing Workplace: A Survey of Employee’s Views and Experiences’ Forum on the Workplace Research Series, number 2. p39
9 Ibid p7
10 OECD, Regulatory Reform In Ireland. (Paris OECD, p2001) p27
11 See Allen 2000 for a discussion of the limited space offered within SIPTU structures for articulating opposition to the Partnership 2000 agreement.
12 http://www.antenna.nl/~waterman/hyman2.html
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