Industrial action in the academy

Here’s something I suspect not many university heads are able to say: on two occasions in my working life I helped organise strike action in a university (in my then capacity as an honorary trade union officer). I stood at picket lines, and on the whole I believe I was quite successful. But it wasn’t an easy task: most colleagues made it very clear to me that taking industrial action was not part of the academic profession’s ethos.

So now, here I am, having now been a university president and principal for 11 years or so, the poacher very definitely turned gamekeeper. And what do I think now of industrial action? After all, there have been several examples of it in Britain and Ireland over recent years.

Notwithstanding the much more militant rhetoric of lecturers’ trade unions these days, the reluctance on the part of academics to take real action is still there. An article in a student magazine from Nottingham University revealed that only 6 per cent of staff supported the recent strike action over pensions by the University and College Union (UCU), with the university Secretary suggesting that the action ‘may not have been noticed’. A year or two ago staff in my then university, DCU, were extremely reluctant to join one day strikes over public service pay cuts in Ireland, voting against participation in the ballot.

As the trade unions identify issues they believe are of concern to members, the way in which they raise these issues and seek to have them resolved favourably becomes crucial. Right now there seems to be an assumption that industrial action is a good way of getting results. Whether this is really true may be open to question. Unions often do not have sufficient membership penetration in universities to win major campaigns through militant action, though such action can create major inconvenience while they last – often at the expense of students. The latter reality also tends to ensure that it is hard for trade unions to make common cause with students, who will not tend to appreciate disruption to their studies, even in pursuit of an aim they support.

Perhaps universities need to look more generally at staff participation and consultation, to ensure that issues do not need to be addressed in a confrontational manner. But in the meantime, traditional industrial action may not be the most effective way for unions to advance their agenda.

The return of ‘industrial action’?

My first academic job back in the 1980s was that of lecturer in industrial relations in Trinity College Dublin. This came just after Britain’s ‘winter of discontent’ that fatally undermined Jim Callaghan’s term as British Prime Minister, and just before the British miners’ strike, which probably more than anything else contributed to the erosion of trade union strength in the UK. In Ireland at the time industrial unrest was also widespread. In the year before I took up my post Ireland had lost over a million working hours due to strikes, about a hundred times the number that would be normal now.

Over the two decades that followed, strike action was subjected to far more legal constraints, including the requirement of a secret ballot before action could go ahead. In addition, with the rise of the ICT sector trade union density – membership as a proportion of the total labour force – declined. This combination produced an era of low levels of industrial action.

Is this about to change? There have been mutterings in Britain about strikes, or even a general strike, in response to government policies and cutbacks. Some trade union leaders have taken to issuing threats, or maybe predictions, of industrial unrest. This in turn has prompted the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to state that trade unions are ‘forces of stagnation’ and that they are set to hinder economic recovery.

While there is clearly a fair amount of uneasiness in society about the impact of government economic policies, there is little evidence that the wider public would look benignly on waves of industrial action. The miners’ strike in the mid-1980s was actually a turning point, in that it helped to swing public opinion behind the Thatcher government rather than against it.

A free society needs to protect the right of employees to withdraw their labour. But using this as a tool in a political campaign is not wise, as has been reccognised by the UK Labour Party. Trade unions would do well to think very carefully about such campaigns.

Action days

Today, as certainly all Irish readers of this blog will know, has been a day of strike action organised by Irish public service trade unions in protest at cuts in funding for public services, expected salary reductions and reductions in staffing. As a result more or less all of Ireland’s public and civil service offices and institutions were shut down, from  government offices to schools. Most universities and colleges were also shut, with the exception of DCU and the University of Limerick, where staff voted not to join in the national strike action.

It was impossible to travel anywhere around Dublin today without seeing groups of people picketing workplaces. Some were low key, but many were very active. As I passed Trinity College’s various entrances by car, for example, it seemed to me that there were very large numbers on picket lines, so that access (even if the gates had been open) would have been difficult, and would certainly have required strong nerves.

And even before the day was over, it was announced by the trade unions that another such day was being planned for December 3.

The day of action, and the seemingly strong participation in it, arose from a feeling amongst public servants that they are the victims of mismanagement by others; that government, banks and business leaders behaved recklessly and lost large sums of money, and that those responsible are being protected or cushioned from the consequences and that public sector employees were being asked to pay for all this. Others also believe that the poor are being targeted while the wealthy are protected. A very significant number of posters being carried on picket lines today demanded that the rich should be taxed more in order to resolve the national economic problems.

No doubt the anger, fear and resentment are understandable, and perhaps the day of action provides an opportunity to let off steam and allow people to express their frustrations. Whether the assessment of our problems on which at any rate the picket line posters are based is accurate is rather another matter. According to the Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan TD, 4 per cent of Irish taxpayers provide almost half of all income tax receipts, while half of the country’s income earners pay no income tax at all. As for the public services, the claim now is that pay levels for public servants are substantially above what is earned by public servants in other comparable countries and also above what is earned by those in the private sector in Ireland; indeed the claim is that this was the case even before substantial increases were applied earlier this decade through the process of benchmarking. At two picket lines today I saw members of the public expressing their anger at the picketers in fairly colourful terms.

Obviously, tempers are hot, and there is a sense that the work being done by public servants is not appreciated – and so it seems to me that a process of reassuring them that this is not so is a step that needs to be taken. A situation where both media comment and political actions seem to be suggesting constantly that public servants are exploiting national resources for selfish ends has not been helpful. On the other hand, it is not likely that actions such as today’s will strengthen the position of public servants, at least not if the rest of society withhold their backing and sympathy. The potential of strikes is that they will alienate the general public rather than encourage them to feel solidarity.

This may be a good time for all sides to think again about their tactics.

Interview with David Begg

What follows is an interview I conducted recently with David Begg, General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU).

What is your view of the current economic environment – are you optimistic or pessimistic for Ireland? Is there light at the end of the tunnel, or can we make any such judgement at the moment?

I think it’s the latter. I think that circumstances are very fraught at the present time. Ireland being a small open economy, we depend hugely on trade, and the international trade situation remains very bad. I saw recently that Japanese exports have reduced by 47.8 per cent, which is extraordinary and illustrates the problems we face globally. In a way we have done better than might have been expected; the last Economic and Social Research Institute commentary had revised the prospects of our own export performance upwards a little bit, which in the circumstances of the world trade environment is really very good. And regardless of what people say, our competitive position really can’t be all that bad if we are still able to achieve outcomes of that kind. But nevertheless, if you associate that with the kind of restructuring that has taken place within the economy with the virtual collapse of the construction industry and serious problems in the financial sector, it is not easy to take huge consolation from that.

There will really have to be a reconfiguration of the Irish economy. How to do that right now, with global trade so depressed, is the question we have to address. We can see stock markets rising a little, and mergers and acquisitions beginning again; but when the government stimulus packages that have been introduced really everywhere except here come to an end, will that emerging recovery end as well? There is also the question of the re-balancing of the trading relationship between China and the rest of the world, but that is also complex because we will be asking the wage slaves of the world to become the consumers of the world, and that cannot happen overnight, not least because their currency will have to strengthen, which will hit their exports.

Some commentators are suggesting now that once all these issues have been resolved we will be able to get back to where we were before, but that is not realistic.

In some ways you might wonder whether we would want to get back to where we were.

I agree, because where we were just wasn’t sustainable. But it took us a long time to realise that. We followed a public policy of growth almost for its own sake, regardless of whether it was ultimately sustainable. I always felt that we should have taken a more deliberate position of optimising the growth that we wanted to achieve, and wondered whether if we had done that we would now be much better off.

How is all this affecting the trade union movement right now? Are you concerned about the future?

We are, in the sense that every factory closure means a loss of trade union membership. Strangely enough, though, our density [the proportion of the labour force organised in trade unions] will probably increase. For the last ten years we were always told that while there might be growth in trade union membership, density was decreasing. Paradoxically, on the way down trade union density probably won’t decrease, so we’ll have increased density but a lower number of members. But you won’t see any headlines in the papers that union density has increased.

Looking at education from the perspective of the trade union movement, do you believe that as a country we have sufficiently prioritised it?

I think the answer to that question requires us to look back to about 1992. At that time the National Economic and Social Council commissioned Professor Lars Mjøset from Norway to have a look at Ireland and consider why we were not doing as well as the Nordic countries, the Netherlands and Switzerland, and one of his main conclusions was that Ireland lacked a national system of innovation, and part of that, I suppose, is a failure to focus properly on education. His report probably never quite got the attention it deserved, perhaps partly because shortly afterwards the economy began to take off, so people thought that our model was actually working and nothing needed to be done. Apart from some start-ups in the ICT sector, we are really hopelessly dependent on international investment, and if we are ever to be really sustainable we need to address that; the mobility of investment is such that our policy of simply offering low taxes won’t do any more. It means we don’t have adequate resources to put into health and education.

So it seems to me that if we want to promote indigenous industry we will need to invest properly in those areas that allow this to happen, one of which must be education. There’s a lot of talk about the knowledge economy, and that’s fine, but in practice we are not delivering that. So for me investment in education is a crucial part of our future which we neglect at our peril.

In some ways we haven’t done too badly, in that our third level graduate output is comparable to the best in Europe, though maybe deficient in terms of PhD numbers. But our class sizes across education are the largest in Europe, and pre-school education doesn’t really exist.

When we consider investment in higher education, the question is now asked as to who should be making that investment: just the state, or also the students. Do you have a view on this?

It is quite a difficult question. If the student makes a contribution, the real fear is that there would be a deterrent for people from lower socio-economic backgrounds getting into higher education, more than the burden that might be placed on graduates later on. Personally, I believe in a model of society, which is in fact close to the Nordic model, in which everyone has an equal opportunity through the education system, and this should be paid from taxation. I believe that there is equity in funding education through a progressive tax system. But we are very polarised about these questions in Ireland, in part because social democracy has never taken hold here.

If we look at the way in which the higher education system might develop, should there be more interaction (beyond industrial relations issues) between universities and the trade union movement?

Probably there should be more than there is. We do have some links. For example, we collaborate on a Bachelor of Business Studies degree in UCD, we have collaborated with DCU in relation to Finance courses, and so on. But these links are not very structured. Perhaps over the past ten years or so there has been this evolution where the relationship between business and the universities has been pursued and developed and people in trade unions have always been a little concerned about that, because we feared it might compromise Newman’s vision of a university as requiring independence of thought. Maybe our side has not actively pursued a relationship, but then again maybe the universities were not particularly interested either.

I would say that we could be in changed circumstances now, because of the changing nature of our society and the growth of unemployment. We need to help people back into earning a living through second chance education. This need not just be through technical courses, but could be through courses in the humanities. I would love to see the universities reaching out to us to see if we can work together in this. This would also be very beneficial for the universities themselves.

The future of trade unionism

My professional academic life began when I became a Lecturer in Industrial Relations at Trinity College Dublin. This was in 1980, and at the time industrial relations were in a mess. The previous year, due largely to a major public sector dispute, Ireland had lost a record number of working days due to industrial action, the number of trade unions was on the whole still growing, the recently agreed ‘National Understanding’ (the then national pay agreement in Ireland) was looking like an unaffordable luxury that hadn’t bought industrial peace, and so on. In Britain industrial relations issues were sounding the death knell for traditional motor car production, and the miners’ strike was only four years away.

In fact, the British miners’ strike, and the arrival of generally non-union hi-tech companies in Ireland, were later in that decade to change industrial relations fundamentally. From then on trade union density declined, unions became a rare sight in certain industries and more generally became weak in the private sector, and the focus in management shifted from industrial relations to human relations. Back then, I was a strong and public advocate for trade union rights, but by the mid-1980s was arguing that trade unions needed to re-think some of their objectives and methods. The emerging younger population, and also the growing female part of the workforce, were unlikely to find the traditional trade union model to be attractive.

Some 25 years on, and much has changed, though some things have stayed. We still have social partnership, which on the whole has helped to sustain the recent period of economic growth by allowing for increasing productivity. But in the workplace trade unions don’t on the whole have the clout they used to have, and in very many workplaces they are not there at all. The main strength of the unions is in the public sector, but the increasing drive to eliminate waste and restrictive practices in the public sector will probably also call their role their into question.

Of course, trade unions too have moved on, and have become much more professional, and have become better at identifying with their members’ and their potential members’ aspirations. But they have not become good enough at selling the case for trade unionism to the public. But unless they do this effectively, they will find it hard to secure their own future.

It is still true that well led trade unions are an important ingredient to secure democracy. Important, but not essential. As the ground shifts once again under our feet, it will be vital for trade unions to consider what role they can and should have in the society of the future, and then to communicate that. I have views on this issue, and will express these in one of my next posts here.