Trade Unions

Trade unions in southern Ireland have undergone ten phases of development, characterized by illegality up to 1824; violent militancy; atrophy after the Great Famine; three waves of agitation influenced by new unionism from 1889, Larkinism from 1907, and syndicalism from 1917; internecine strife from 1923 to 1945; national free collective bargaining from 1946; centralized bargaining from 1970; and social partnership from 1987. The story of unions in Ulster conforms more to the British periodization.

The 1841 census enumerated 240,000 male artisans and 1.2 million male unskilled workers, the bulk of them agricultural laborers. (There were also more than one million working women, mainly in clothing and domestic service, who were not members of trade unions.) Despite the enactment of anticombination laws prescribing trade union laws beginning in 1729, journeymen artisans formed secret societies as the guilds lost their role in trade protection. With the repeal of the combination acts in 1824, local craft unions formed in the main cities. These new unions had a militant conception of their role initially, but following violent episodes and an economic slump in the late 1830s, they adopted a "moral force" strategy in the 1840s and pursued their demands through campaigns for public support. Unskilled rural laborers were afforded some protection by the Whiteboy movements that emerged in 1760 to defend tenant farmers and others. In Leinster in particular, Whiteboyism extended to unskilled urban workers through Ribbon lodges, another variant of the secret societies which used violence or intimidation to protect laborers from employers or landlords.

After the famine, unions in southern Ireland were weakened by demographic and economic decline. In the industrializing north, craft unions developed with the growth of engineering and shipbuilding. In the textiles and clothing industries, unions of skilled and semi-skilled men emerged in the 1870s, and some progress was made in organizing women in the 1890s. Although unions in Ulster remained secular, victimization of Catholic workers regularly accompanied political crises from the 1860s to the 1920s.

The waves of industrial unrest between 1889 and 1923 called attention to the difficulty of building bargaining power for a movement in an undeveloped economy with a craft elite too small to take the lead in trade unionism. Though new unionism was largely crushed by 1891, it gave rise to the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC) in 1894. Modeled on its British namesake, the ITUC was an inappropriate form of confederation for Ireland, as it was based on industrial organization, where labor was weak. The alternative of creating an essentially political confederation linked to the national movement was rejected. The only rationale for the ITUC format was the British example, and it reflected labor's mental colonization. British unions, often called "amalgamateds," had been extending themselves to Ireland since the 1840s. By 1900, out of some 900,000 Irish waged workers, fewer than 70,000 were organized, and 75 percent of these belonged to British unions. The ITUC provided no leadership to unions until 1918 (O Connor 1992).

Anglicization affected labor politics profoundly. From the repeal movement in the 1830s until the fall of Parnell in 1890, trade unions had endorsed successive nationalist movements in the hope that self-government and tariffs would reverse the deindustrialization that accompanied Ireland's integration into the British economy. The ITUC, however, took the view that unions should restrict themselves to purely labor politics. Despite the reverence accorded to James Connolly after his execution in 1916, labor leaders never lost the sense of socialism and nationalism as dichotomous.

Anglicization was partially reversed by the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union (ITGWU), which was founded in 1909 by James Larkin as "an Irish union for Irish workers." In addition, Larkin and Connolly encouraged the ITUC to constitute itself as a Labour Party in 1914. After traumatic defeat in the 1913 lockout, ITGWU membership mushroomed from 1917. The ITUC was radicalized by revolution at home and abroad, and Labour assisted in the struggle for Irish independence without allying with Sinn Féin, a policy variously interpreted as skillful or a wasted opportunity to shape the new Ireland. When the boom years of 1916 to 1920 yielded to a slump, Labour's radicalism was gutted in a series of major strikes. The Labour Party entered parliamentary politics in 1922 but averaged only 11.4 percent of the vote until 1987. Congress and the Labour Party separated in 1930, though many unions continued to affiliate with the party. By 1923 Irish labor had assumed its modern form: The southern movement was substantially Irish-based, and unions in the North were overwhelmingly British. By default the ITUC retained its all-Ireland jurisdiction because the British Trades Union Congress was reluctant to engage with Ulster.

Unions were not important to Irish state policy until Fianna Fáil's industrialization drive in the 1930s; henceforth, the state would be an increasingly significant determinant of trade union strategy. Interunion disputes in the 1930s led the government to press for an end to the multiplicity of unions. The ITGWU especially wanted to replace sectionalist trade unionism with industrial unionism, and blamed the ITUC's failure to reform on resistance from British-based unions. Union membership in the North grew substantially during World War II, especially among general workers and women. The ITUC redressed its neglect of the North by establishing in 1944 a Northern Ireland Committee—in effect, a regional congress. Mounting friction between Irish- and British-based unions culminated in a split in 1945, when many private-sector Irish unions formed the Congress of Irish Unions. Their expectations of a more positive relationship with the state and of legislation to eliminate the British unions were disappointed. The two congresses united as the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) in 1959.

Nineteen forty-six marked a watershed in labor history with the introduction of the Labour Court, which enabled workers to win wage increases without first establishing bargaining power through militancy, and with the introduction of national rounds of wage bargaining. Membership rose significantly from 1946 to 1951 and again in the 1960s. Renewed industrialization, accelerating inflation, and strikes in the 1960s brought government calls for centralized bargaining, and the first National Wage Agreement was struck in 1970. During the mid-1970s the government became a partner in the agreements, turning employer-labor bipartism into tripartism. Tripartite "national understandings" followed in 1979 and 1980. The failure of tripartism to address rising unemployment, inflation, and unofficial strike actions prompted a return to free collective bargaining in 1982, but the government brokered a deeper tripartism in the Programme for National Recovery in 1987. Four more social partnership programs were signed between 1990 and 2000.

Centralized bargaining became the most controversial issue in trade unionism in the 1980s and 1990s. Craft and British-based unions usually opposed central agreements, arguing that they eroded union democracy and amounted to wage restraint. General unions, which included all grades but represented a high proportion of low paid workers with a weak bargaining power, were the most supportive, claiming that the agreements contributed to the "Celtic Tiger," the label often given to the Republic's high economic growth rates since 1994. They kept the Republic free of the anti-union policies adopted by many other European countries. While union density (the proportion of employees that belong to unions) shrank in the early 1980s, and the number of unions was reduced through mergers, density in the Republic in 2001 was relatively high, at almost 50 percent. By contrast, union density in Northern Ireland fell from a peak of 61 percent in 1983 to 36 percent in 2001 (ICTU 2001; Labour Force Survey 2001).

After 1968 the Northern Ireland government's traditional suspicion of unions gave way to a friendlier understanding between the unions and the state. Partly because unions were valued as allies in the propaganda war against paramilitarism, the Conservative government's labor legislation, which weakened trade unions by, for example, making the "closed shop" and secondary picketing illegal, was not fully applied to Northern Ireland until 1993. In 1972 the ICTU decided that it would be "inappropriate" to comment on Northern Ireland's constitutional question, and in addressing the "Troubles," unions gave priority to avoiding controversy, citing the absence of serious workplace sectarian conflict to justify their stance; critics accused them of reticence on oppression and inequality. In the 1990s, the consensus behind the peace process encouraged the ICTU to become more assertive, and it campaigned for the Belfast Agreement.

Trade Unions

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