The Government’s apparent decision to prioritise the private sector over people in the budget has left many workers struggling to make ends meet, according to Siptu’s general secretary-elect, John King.
If there is any upside to his generally downbeat assessment of the current landscape, it seems, it is that he believes there is fertile ground in which to grow trade union membership during the six year term he will start in March.
There are many challenges for the movement, he acknowledges, “but I think there are opportunities too for the unions to go out there to say: ‘We are the voice of working people,’ that we are capable of offering a vision of hope for a better Ireland, a better society, for proper pay and proper conditions. I think that’s where the space for us is.”
King has been around long enough to see the unions’ fortunes ebb and flow.
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As the son of a lifelong Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) member who worked on the railways and in hotels, and a laundry worker who aged 15 had participated in the 1945 Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU) strike credited with securing many Irish workers a second week of annual paid holidays, going to work for a union felt, he says, like a natural thing to do.
He did it 37 years ago, aged 20, when he joined the Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland (FWUI) as an administrator and a few years later got to cover an official’s maternity leave in Tipperary before landing the organising role of his own in the IWWU. It had by then become a part of the FWUI which would later merge into the ITGWU which became Siptu, the country’s largest union with close to 200,000 members.
After serving in a wide range of roles, he is currently one of three deputy general secretaries and has responsibility for the public sector. He will succeed Joe Cunningham as general secretary in March having run unopposed and has been ratified for the position at this week’s delegate conference.
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“I think it’s a challenging time for unions but also one of great opportunity,” he says.
Fiercely critical of a Government he believes has reneged on many of the commitments its main parties previously made to workers, he suggests measures like the VAT reductions granted to the housing sector will do nothing to get new apartments built while the one for hospitality was a gift to employers.
Meanwhile, he says, “working people are really struggling at the moment. They are going through an enduring cost of living crisis with food prices, energy costs, accommodation all built into that”.
“I actually believe working people view the Government as having abandoned them. There’s so much evidence of that, particularly within the last 12 months,” he says, citing issues like the delay to the extension of sick pay days, to auto-enrolment and the living wage.
Declining membership numbers in the private sector, however, mean unions are not readily viewed as a means of progress by many of those they regard as natural constituents and so recruiting will be a priority for Siptu, during his six year term, King says.
Like many in the movement, he takes encouragement from research published three years ago by UCD’s Prof John Geary and Dr Maria Belizón, which suggested a majority of young people would like to be represented by a union in their workplace.
“They value trade unions although a lot of the research also indicates that many of them are concerned as to how the employer would respond.”
That is a key issue for the unions to surmount with many recognition campaigns petering out at the Labour Court recommendation stage. Still, King points to the current dispute at Carroll’s Cuisine in Tullamore where Siptu members are due to strike on Sunday and Monday in an attempt to win collective bargaining rights.
“People talk about the voluntary nature of our industrial relations system but the way that’s interpreted and acted out now by employers is that it gives them the right to exercise a veto.
“In fairness, it is difficult for workers to go out on strike when they realise they’re dealing with a hostile government that may not intervene to provide assistance but the workers in Carroll’s Cuisine, who are predominantly a migrant workforce on very, very low pay and conditions, they’re taking that stand, and we’re certainly going to support them.
“But it is a very stark illustration of how this Government is failing workers who want to join a trade union for the purpose of engaging in collective bargaining.”
Siptu and the wider movement still hope progress will be made on the issue through the measures proposed in the Government action plan published last week as part of its implementation of the EU directive on Adequate Minimum Wages although the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment, Peter Burke, has made it clear that that voluntarist aspect of the Irish system, will not be undermined.
There are other challenges on the horizon, not least artificial intelligence (AI), which everybody accepts will impact hugely on the jobs market even if there is a less unanimity on what that impact will be.
“I’m not sure that there’s enough evidence to accurately put a pin in that but we’re certainly trying to get policies and agreements in place on it with employers, both private and public.”
His suggestion that there are “some European policies on it, and we’re currently engaging or trying to draft a policy on it,” is indicative of the difficulty unions generally seem to be having with such a vast, fast moving issue.
And even the most benign estimations of AI’s impact on the labour market, the ones that suggest many winners, also suggest there will be many losers. A significant portion of those could be the types of workers the unions typically represent.
Still, he is positive about the potential for Siptu and its members to be in a better place when he concludes his term – he could stand for reelection – and hopeful there might be an alternative government in power by then.
“It was very, very good to see that the parties of the left were able to come together behind the unity [presidential] candidate, and to be able to share that space to deliver an alternative,” says King, himself a long-time Labour Party member.
“We have to hope that out of that, the left parties will understand the possibility for the electorate, that if they can carve out the space for a common platform to offer that alternative for the first time to Irish workers then, yeah, we could have a left led government.”
