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- ****** The Dunnes Strike & Managing Change *******
-- the two souls of Irish trade unionism.
Guest Writer
For three weeks, in June-July, nearly 6,000 mostly
young and part-time workers struck against Ireland's
largest private sector employer, the firmly anti-union
Dunnes Stores, over Sunday trading, zero-hours
contracts, the proportion of full-time jobs and other
issues. But the principal, and unstated, issues were
probably union recognition and the organisation of the
newly emergent semi-casual, part-time, young (and
mainly female) section of the labour force. The
result, while disappointing on the concrete 'economic'
issues, was generally greeted as something of a
breakthrough on the latter 'political' issues.
Power in the darkness.
The Dunnes Stores strike came upon a sickly, scared and
handcuffed trade union movement with the healing touch
of restoration. It stood in sharp contrast to the grim
series of industrial disputes that preceded it.
Previous disputes at Packard, TEAM Aer Lingus, Irish
Steel, Pat the Baker, Nolans resulted in demoralising
defeats which seemed to deliver further body blows to a
downwardly debilitating movement.
Everybody in the labour movement seems to agree on the
positive significance of the Dunnes strike. The
Biennial Conference of the Irish Congress of Trade
Unions (ICTU) in Tralee, which overlapped last July
with the final week of the strike, was reportedly
overjoyed at the outcome. Peter Cassels, ICTU General
Secretary, congratulated the Labour Court on its
recommendation.
At the other end of the spectrum responses were even
more enthusiastic if with a different focus. "The
Dunnes strike was a turning point", said Socialist
Worker1. Militant declared: "The Dunnes strike can be
the start of a general fight back by the working class"
and "In many ways it has an historic significance."2
The Dunnes strike revealed to all that not alone was
there still fight left in the trade union movement, but
it was present where it was widely unexpected, among
young, unorganised, part-time workers. It provided
almost the first example in the last three years of a
sucessful strike. Furthermore the Dunnes workers
received the almost universal support of the general
public, the media, the political parties, the Church,
the state (which paid them the dole!), celebrities
(even Boyzone!) and the trade union leadership. What
refreshment, after the pillorying of the Irish Steel
and TEAM craftworkers, the isolation of the Pat the
Baker and Nolans Transport strikers, the (varying)
sympathy for, but apparent helplessness of the Packard
Electric workers.
Preceding elation was relief, on all sides of the
movement. The left dreaded another defeat.3 Even the
Congress leaders could see that a defeat for MANDATE4
in Dunnes would be a devastating blow to trade union
strength and what place have generals without an army?
On top of that Dunnes would have scored this triumph
outside of the carefully built-up industrial relations
machinery to which officialdom is so committed.5
Why the Dunnes strike won
Different sectors interpreted the victory in different
ways. Two remarkable features of the strike were the
professional public relations campaign of MANDATE and
the overwhelming support of shoppers in refusing to
enter the stores. Michael Foley, the Media
Corespondent of the Irish Times, under a sub-heading
stating, "the Dunnes Stores strike was fought and won
on television, radio and in the newspapers", wrote:
"The picket line in the Dunnes Stores dispute was not a
way of ensuring that the stores remained closed or a
method of convincing others not to trade with the
company, but a media event, a photo opportunity and an
opportunity for sound bites".6
On the same page it was reported, in relation to "the
success of the strike", that "senior members of the
ICTU took the opportunity of the organisation's
biennial conference in Tralee this week to hammer home
repeatedly to members the importance of using
industrial relations procedures to the maximum and the
necessity of mobilising public support, as well as
industrial muscle, if disputes were going to be fought
and won."7
Here the accidental is emphasised over the essential.
The Dunnes strike revolved around two issues. The
first is that MANDATE had the numbers and used them,
not least in legally dodgy mass pickets. The second is
that the refusal of the company to use the industrial
relations procedures underlined the irrelevance of any
mediating machinery to the workers without industrial
action.
A more satisfying analysis was given by Dermot Connolly
writing in Militant as follows: "In contrast (to the
half-hearted conduct of previous disputes by the
unions) the Dunnes strike was superbly organised. They
(MANDATE's officials and executive) knew that Dunnes
were out to break the union and worked non-stop for six
weeks to prepare the membership and counter every
attempt by management to sow confusion and split the
ranks. A national shop stewards committee was formed
along with strike committees in the shops, mass
picketing was encouraged. ICTU was pressurised into
calling for a boycott of Dunnes and urging workers with
their suppliers not to pass pickets. They didn't hide
behind the need to call ballots before doing this as
they have claimed to be the case in other disputes. A
glimpse of the real potential power of the trade union
movement was shown, and at the same time the fact that
all the weaknesses of the unions to-day, the so-called
decline in solidarity,8the inability to organise
serious struggles comes from the top." 9
The emphasis here is on shop floor organisation,
militancy, industrial solidarity and the mass activity
of the members themselves (rather than token
picketlines) as the key essentials to the success of
the strike.
Managing Change
If the Dunnes strike was a 'turning point', there was
also another turning point (or rather, another turn of
the screw) at the same time. The Biennial Conference
of the ICTU showed the second of the two souls of Irish
trade unionism. The ICTU planted yet another milestone
in the road of 'partnership' and 'consensus' with the
adoption of the document Managing Change and Motion 19.
Managing Change is the latest development of what Peter
Cassels, ICTU General Secretary, refers to as "the
trade union agenda for a new century".10 It follows a
long line of Congress documents including "New Forms of
Work Organisation" from the 1993 Conference.
The 1993 paper advised a new co-operative or
participatory approach to such things as human resource
management, world class manufacturing and total quality
control: precisely the kind of new management
techniques that lay-activists had hitherto been warned
about as undermining trade union organisation.
Commenting on the paper Peter Cassels said, "to
innovate effectively... requires a high trust
environment with workers and their unions accepted by
companies as partners in the enterprises."11
Local consensus was taken some steps further at this
year's conference, where 1995's theme paper was
Managing Change. The Irish Times pr?cised its contents
thus: "Accepting that global markets and the speed of
technological change now make company restructuring an
almost constant process, Congress wants member-unions
to become pro-active in this situation. Traditionally
unions have resisted change and have focused on
defending members' rights. ICTU wants to reverse that
role."12
Plainly Congress has no problem with the logic of
redundancies and worsened conditions. As the trade
union leadership entered into a joint economic, social
and (on many issues) political strategy with the
government and the employers through the National
Programmes, embracing austerity in the '80s, it has now
accepted a consensus approach to new management
techniques and 'rationalisation', in the individual
firm, embracing competitiveness in the '90s. At both
levels the same strategy is applied: accommodation
rather than resistance. At both levels the same
justification is given: let us get in on it, in order
to influence it!
Myth and Reality
The reality of the workplace is remote from the myth
of cosy partnership. Relentlessly employers have
continued to 'rationalise' and 'restructure' with
redundancies, natural wastage, conversion to contract
labour, new 'yellowpack' starting rates, flexibility
and new work practices often gained by threats of
closure. It's not just at Packard that things thought
long-buried, like straight wage cuts or longer working
weeks, have returned from labour history. The very
unions themselves are being undermined by their
'social partners' through the dismantling of shop floor
organisation, 'no-strike' clauses, generosity to non-
union people and, of course, 'human resource'
techniques.
Matt Merrigan, former President of Congress, says it in
his own inimitable style: "Trade unionists in the
workplace see no evidence of the shared duties,
responsibilities and decision-making that are inferred
in the texts of these programmes. Consensus and
partnership are not in the lexicon of individual
employers at plant level, rather it is: comply or
else."13 Perhaps the current President of Congress
might give us a lexicon of the companies with a "high
trust environment". Aer Lingus, Allied Irish
Banks....Zoe Developments?
This year's model, Managing Change develops workplace
partnership from the general operation and development
of the firm into the specific area of 'change'. Thus
Congress addresses a current concern of the pundits of
capital: the globalisation of capital and the
consequent 'need' for rationalisation and 'downsizing'
as general and constant features rather than just in
the odd ailing company. It also addresses the
continuing restructuring, part privatisation and
exposure to competition of the semi-state sector - as
seen in the past at An Post, Irish Steel, TEAM and in
the coming year at the ESB14 and Telecom Eireann.
A new world?
The motif of 'competitiveness' running through
workplace partnership and the current union-employer-
government agreement (the Programme for Competitiveness
and Work) does not make a good match with trade
unionism, which one was led to believe arose as an
antidote to competition between companies and between
workers themselves.15 It blends well though with a
revamped world-view placing the trade union eggs in the
basket of the EU, the Maastricht Treaty, a strong
currency and the European Social Charter. A world view
that sees itself getting behind the perceived dawn of
new technology. A world views that seeks to sail with
a restructuring capitalism and the ascendancy of new
right ideology. One which compensates for the decline
in labour militancy by seeking to place trade union
relevance elsewhere than in the class struggle. This
results in a half- belief in the end of the working
class as an entity and the transformation of its
members into consumers.
It is a political economy based on the OECD, the ESRI
and the NESC16. Once, and not so long ago, the
economic policies of trade union leaders was based
largely on state enterprise and the public sector.
This underlying doctrine has been replaced without
acknowledgement. A discredited statism has been
replaced by a fatalistic adoption of the market; a loss
of belief in any kind of 'socialist' alternative
replaced with a 'new realism' that contends there is no
basic alternative.
This creeping conversion has to some extent been
fuelled latterly by the collapse of the 'Soviet' bloc,
towards which many union leaders and backroom gurus
sidewardly looked. 17
Just how far into the business ethos things have gone
is illustrated in the ICTU 1995 Pre-Budget Submission,
which declares: "Improved competitiveness is crucial
for economic growth and job creation and must be
protected from upward pressure on pay and inflation."
Once it was the employers and government ministers who
said that wage rises cause inflation and unemployment.
John O'Dowd, General Secretary of the Civil and Public
Services Union (CPSU), writing in the Sunday Tribune in
August about the need for confidence in the "change
process" in Telecom Eireann (i.e. the cutting of
several thousand jobs) said, "competition is here to
stay and Telecom staff depend on achieving, and
sustaining competitive advantage within this new
environment."18
As with much of the unions' thinking over the past
decade Managing Change is a legislation of existing
practice. There is nothing new about union officials
arguing for an employer's proposals - or a compromise
version of them - on the job. Congress brought this to
a high point in 1994, the centenary of its foundation,
by becoming the 'persuader' in Irish Steel and TEAM Aer
Lingus alongside employers, politicians and the media.
Actually, Managing Change and Motion 19 arose directly
out of a review group established by Congress to
investigate 'what went wrong' in these two cases (where
some workers were hard to persuade).
Managing change - never had a policy a more apt title.
The system requires regular change, to ensure
competitiveness and profitability. There's a need for
an apparatus - complete with apparatchiks - for its
smooth operation. The rough edges of the employers'
proposals may have to be trimmed. The workforce will
be delivered up to accept the essence of the changes
all systematised through a prepared procedure. No more
cliff-side ballots, no more embarrassing blockades on
the Airport Road, no more 'workers vote for sucide'
newspaper articles, no (perish the thought) importation
of Air France-type direct action resistance.
In the new schema, of course, it is the rank and file
who live with the changes, while the leaders enter the
corridors of power and increase their salaries. (The
three General Officers of SIPTU receive ?7O,OOO per
annum, according to the Sunday Independent. 19 That's
before car and expenses.)
Bureaucrats as policemen.
Managing Change extends the domain of the persuader and
of the police officer within the industrial relations
process. Peter Cassels, answering criticism20 that the
ICTU might "whip the trade unions into line", said:
"And if that requires us telling a trade union they're
off-side we'll say they're off-side. And if it requires
telling union members they're off-side, then we'll tell
them they're off-side." 21
In defending the proposal for 'a pro-active approach to
changes in work-practices' he said: "We have a choice,
we can leave it to the employers to set the agenda and
do what trade unionists have been doing in other
countries and react. Or we can try and shape the
future." The Irish Times report continues: "He cited
the fight to save jobs at Waterford Crystal and the
Cost and Competitiveness Review in the ESB and Telecom
Eireann as situations in which unions have seized the
initiative in shaping change".22
These citations were unfortunate and upon them any
'traditionalist' can rest his or her case. The
instance at Waterford Crystal was a signal defeat, the
breaking of arguably the strongest and most class
conscious group of Irish workers at the time. The ESB
and Telecom reviews are all about the loss of thousands
of the best (and best-unionised) jobs in the country
and the unions' happy cooperation with same!
Motion 19 puts Managing Change into specific points of
policy. And here alarm bells ring as Congress once
again ties the hands of its members. Motion 19
proposed "the conclusion of a Framework Document with
employer bodies on how change in the workplace should
be negotiated."23 Congress not only want to "lead the
charge for change" (Peter Cassels again) but it wants a
centralised agreement to govern how it is approached.
The local element as a feature of workplace partnership
didn't get very far, did it?
This codified procedure would, without doubt, lay down
how, when and where to negotiate and, above all, what
to negotiate. Any pre-cooked negotiation schedule would
have to give an assurance to the employers that the
unions would not rule out negotiation, at least, on any
proposal from local employers. Then the matter would go
to the Labour Relations Commission (as specified in
Motion 19) after which workers would be expected to
ballot (or the Editorials would want to know why not)
on a 'compromise' third-party recommendation.
As the National Programmes have, since 1987, removed
the (offensive) power of workers to put claims to their
own employers, this new centralised departure would
remove, or severely undermine, the (defensive) power of
workers to reject adverse changes in their own
employment. Any 'framework agreement' that emerges
should go to a ballot and be campaigned against.
Furthermore Motion 19 calls for a measure that you
might, if you were not up to speed with the charge to
the right of the ICTU, have expected union leaders to
denounce if IBEC, the employers' organisation, proposed
it. This is the introduction of mandatory use of third
party machinery in procedures and disputes24. The first
consideration is the fatal delay and sidetracking that
can be involved in processing urgently needed
industrial action through the labyrinth. The second is
the bias and the malleability of the Labour Relations
Commission and the Labour Court.
Compulsory conciliation is, of course, well established
in Irish industrial relations: in SIPTU (in practice),
in the public service and legally for 'individual'
disputes under the 1990 Industrial Relations Act. What
Motion 19 would do is to extend and copperfasten it
into (here it comes again) national arrangements with
government and employer organisations.
Finally, the Motion establishes aggregate ballots where
in certain situations Congress can insist on a single
vote on a change package. This is Congress' response
to the Irish Steel crisis in which the craftworkers
rejected the company's 'survival' plan which the
majority (mainly SIPTU) general workers accepted.
Congress and SIPTU supported the plan and will support
similar plans in future situations. So Managing Change
infers that the rejection of worsened conditions by an
independent section is perceived, not as an opportunity
upon which to build stronger opposition, but as a
problem to be overcome by the majority votes of the
already persuaded. This pseudodemocracy takes no
account of valid craft demarcations or cases where one
section are asked to take more odious changes than
another.
Two Souls
Overlapping as it was with the ICTU Conference, the
Dunnes Stores strike (and its resolution) provided a
special occasion to view the two souls of Irish trade
unionism together. Connections between the two were
real enough, and some others were made by Congress
leaders adopting the Dunnes experience and by
journalists juxtaposing two major industrial events.
The Dunnes dispute was used specifically by Phil Flynn
as an example of the need for "mandatory third-party
reference of disputes".25 Through Dunnes-and their
refusal to even attend the LRC - the 'innovators' have
been able to portray mandatory mediation as a
constraint upon the employers while overlooking its
suffocating effect on workers' action. This portrayal
is easily achieved because third-party referral is now
almost automatic on the union side, because of the
unions' own dispute procedures and because of the
prevalent lack of confidence among workers about having
a straight fight. It's the employers who are perceived
to be beyond this due process and who need to be tied
into it through a tripartheid commitment.
Commentators painted the strike as a watershed to which
the ICTU's Tralee agenda corresponded. Padraig Yeates,
Industry and Employment Correspondent of the Irish
Times first appeared to acknowledge the differences
between them: "ln many ways the Dunnes Stores strike is
a very traditional one, about defending basic workers'
rights rather than mediating change to meet the needs
of 'global' competition". This perception
notwithstanding he goes on, "yet delegates are keenly
aware that the Dunnes Stores dispute is just as
relevant to the ICTU's modern agenda." By way of
explanation for this relevance he continues: "It is the
first national strike involving a new generation of
part-time workers who are only just begining to join
unions." 26 This was precisely the strike's
significance, but not its relevance to the modern
agenda.
Perhaps Padraig Yeates was reflecting the connection
which Congress thinkers make to justify the modern
agenda, as an adaption to the emergent generation of
casualised and unorganised young workers - through
consensus rather than struggle! In Towards A New
Century, a veritable manifesto of new unionism, Peter
Cassels writes: "Labour market changes are also
producing a 'new' and growing workforce of part-time,
temporary, casual, contract and home workers...The
changing composition of the workforce is changing the
content of the trade union agenda which in turn is
changing how we process that agenda." 27
The Dunnes strike has demonstrated that the road ahead,
in trade union terms, for this new generation is not
the 'new agenda'. A good old fashioned strike has more
claim to that (more but not all - some real tactical
head-scratching is needed, for example, in relation to
struggle at mobile multinationals).
"The start of a general fightback" it could be, yet
even its own resolution was a steadying reminder that
the other soul (the consensus loving one) envelopes
even the great Dunnes strike with its deadening
presence. An outsider might conclude that MANDATE
halted the march just when they had Dunnes on the run.
One insider described it as, "Let's not lose, rather
than win".28
Of course the recommendation to call off the strike
after three weeks may have been prudent, rather than
weak-kneed, leadership: avoiding a long industrial
campaign with raw recruits. The same insider claims,
however, that "the general feeling of the activist
layer in MANDATE was against the Labour Court
recommendation"29 The Sunday Tribune quotes one shop
steward as saying, "we've been sold out."30 The
reccommendation was accepted by nearly four to one in
MANDATE.
One way or the other, a great triumph of the strike was
that a powerful and determinedly anti-union employer,
employing a 'new' and casualised workforce, was forced
to grant de facto recognition to the union. But the
settlements on the particular issues upon which the
strike was fought represent rather modest gains and, in
some cases, could set unfavourable precedents in the
retail industry.
The settlement
Compulsory Sunday working was accepted and extended to
the previously exempt pre-October 1994 workers. It
seems a kind of mockery that European law and practice
is continually used to get workers to take changes and
comply with the norm while Ireland is the only state in
the EU where Sunday trading is permitted without any
regulation.
The elimination of 'zero-hour' (on-call) contracts was
a major achievement. Under the settlement there's a
minimum of fifteen hours a week work for part-timers
and split shifts are abolished.
Although the Labour Court recommend time-and-a-half for
Sunday working (as against Dunnes' demand for flat-rate
working for new workers) this sets up two pay rates for
the same work (senior workers keep double time) and is
below rates enjoyed in some other union stores. On the
ratio of full-time to part-time posts the settlement
(two hundred extra full-time posts) makes no
qualitative difference in a workforce of 6,000.
Our 'insider' reflects as follows: "In drawing up a
balance sheet of the strike it would be wrong to say
that defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory, or
even that the outcome was a draw. From where this
dispute started, the gains won were greater than the
concessions made. Dunnes set out to break the union,
and achieved the opposite. The union is stronger than
at any time in the past. The members are more
confident and a new layer of militants will come into
activity."31
Perhaps the main achievement was the 'political' one of
the moderately successful arrival of this large sector
of atomised young workers - feared by some to be beyond
the pale of trade unionism - on the stage of organised
working class struggle. Plus, perhaps, the uplifting
impact of the strike on the consciousness of workers in
general.
It might have been expected that in the aftermath of
the strike the official trade union milieu arrived at
some new conclusions on how to organise industrial
struggle. This certainly didn't happen immediately.
At the end of the same month, at another retail giant,
the Marks and Spencer stores in Dublin, there was
another three-week strike, this time by SIPTU warehouse
workers centring on changes in shift patterns. On
approaching the (Mary St) store it was evident that
while the usual amount of shoppers was down there was
still a good number inside. Where had the remarkable
support of shoppers gone in three weeks? A large part
of the answer was surely that the vast majority of the
workers, including the shop assistants who are MANDATE
members, were still working away! It seemed that the
Dunnes strike had made little impact on the official
world of SIPTU (who were absurdly asking shoppers not
to patronise Marks and Spencer where their fellow trade
unionists were quite clearly waiting to serve them).
Neither had MANDATE been greatly effected as they
seemed to have developed a sudden attack of
forgetfulness, thereby enabling the very thing they'd
feared a month earlier - the public passing the picket
and a staff there to meet them.
A SIPTU picketer offered the information that they
didn't want to ask the MANDATE members to come out at
that stage. Some of the picketers did not maintain
this relaxed view of the picketline throughout,
expressing strong disagreement with large vehicles,
insisting on a relaxed approach of their own. Part of
the settlement of this strike was, incidentally, the
establishment of a joint participative review of the
warehouse operation which sounds awfully like an early
application of Managing Change.
Padraig Yeates finished his thoughtful Irish Times
commentary with: "The Dunnes Stores dispute highlights
the crisis facing the trade union movement. It will be
up to the delegates (to the ICTU Conference) this week
to decide if Congress is coming up with the right
solutions."32 At the end of that week it would seem to
be confirmed that the (at least) moderate success of
the Dunnes strike, and the methods it employed,
militant, organised and imaginative, met the crisis,
and highlighted that Congress is coming up not with
solutions but with problems.
Footnotes
1 Socialist Worker, 8-21 Jul. '95.
2 Militant, Jul.-Aug. '95.
3 Sporadic victories such as Blooms Hotel (Dublin), the
Eastern Health Board (IMPACT) and Knightingales (Dublin
store) had been stars too remote to lighten the
darkness.
4 MANDATE, the main striking union, representing most
Dunnes workers.
5 The ICTU's public intervention emphasised Dunnes'
refusal to co-operate with the Labour Relations
Commission.
6 Irish Times, 8-7-95.
7 Ibid.
8 The desert that was Dunnes answered, belatedly but
baldly, the comment of the General Secretary of SIPTU
(Ireland's largest union), Billy Attley, at a Union
conference, that the Pat the Baker strikers (1993) had
been beaten not by anything the unions did or didn't do
but by the "lack of solidarity" (by which he meant,
people bought the bread).
9 Militant, op.cit.
10 P. Cassels, Towards A New Century in Trade Union
Century, ed. D.Nevin (Mercier Press, 1994) p.427.
11 Sunday Tribune, 1-8-93 (my emphasis).
12 Padraig Yeates, Industrial and Employment
Corespondent, Irish Times, 3-7-95.
13 Matt Merrigan, Co-operation is a capitalist asset,
Irish Reporter No.17 (1995).
14 Electricity Supply Board.
15 Peter Cassels was this year appointed to the
Competitiveness Advisory Group of the European Union
(EU).
16 The last two are Irish economic think tanks.
17 Democratic Left are ex-stalinists currently in the
Irish governing coalition. An article in their
magazine Times Change (don't they just) on The Future
of Work by Sean Kelly ends: "In the global competitive
trade wars that are now being witnessed it appears that
the only source of job security for workers is
satisfied customers."
(Times Change, Autumn/Winter 1994.).
18 Sunday Tribune, 13-8-95.
19 Sunday Independent, 20-8-95. SIPTU (Services
Industrial Professional Technical Union)
20 from TEEU delegate Tim Lawless at Tralee
21 Irish Times 6-7-95.
22 Ibid. 6-7-95.
23 Ibid. 3-7-95.
24 The reporting of this clause as proposing
compulsory arbitration has sown confusion. Compulsory
arbitration is the compulsory acceptance of a third-
party decision while compulsory conciliation (the
Motion 19 proposal) is the compulsory referral to a
third party for recommendation. There's one hell of a
difference, and even I would not expect Congress to
suddenly call a complete ceasefire in the class war.
Apparently, it was 'clarified' at the Conference that
this section was not 'prescriptive' and there would be
'consultation' with unions further on.
25 Irish Times, 3-7-95. Phil Flynn, ICTU President, in
the same interview, says that Dunnes Stores "is not
anti-union, but non-union".
26 Ibid., 4-7-95
27 Towards a new Century, P.Cassels, op.cit. p.425.
28 A 'prominent Mandate activist' (anonymous), Militant
op.cit.
29 Ibid..
30 Sunday Tribune, 9-7-95.
31 Militant, op. cit.
32 Irish Times, 4-7-95.