The Blind Alley of the IWU

national | worker & community struggles and protests | opinion/analysis Monday September 20, 2004 13:37 by Liberty Hall Langer’

Opinion piece on the IWU

Sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Out with corrupt old unions, in with new revolutionary unions, problem solved. Or is it? After all, ‘social partnership’ is the major problem facing the working class, no?

Well, no. The major problem facing Irish workers is that fewer than 30% of them are organised into trade unions, a figure which drops below 20% in the case of private-sector workers. Figures like that indicate a decline into irrelevance, and fast, with all that that entails for income inequality in an already deeply divided society.

Lenin called unions ‘schools of communism’, and certainly any progressive cause worthy of the name has to have the involvement of unionised workers. Weaken the unions, you weaken everything else: the emerging ‘Seattle’ movement, protestors for peace, womens’ rights, opposition to racism, and so on. So the need for strong unions extends outside the workplace.

One would expect new radical unions, especially ones which explicitly evoke the legacies of Larkin and Connolly in their literature (see www.union.ie), to be busy taking the basic message of trade unionism to the minimum-wage underclass. And make no mistake, they’re there: the Celtic Tiger isn’t roaring because of Intel and Hewlett-Packard, but because of hospitality, tourism, low-tech manufacturing, personal services and private healthcare, sectors characterised by lack of union organisation and (consequently) low pay. But the Independent Workers’ Union isn’t doing that at all. Let’s examine where the IWU is actually directing its attentions.

A glance at the IWU website turns up an appeal to Aer Rianta and Aer Lingus workers to oppose redundancies. No trade unionist can disagree with that, but the fundamental problem for a trade unionist seeking to tell Aer Rianta and Aer Lingus workers that is how to avoid being trampled in the rush for the exits after the negotiation of a fabulous redundancy deal negotiated by nasty SIPTU and IMPACT.
Now the IWU is seeking to recruit Dublin Bus drivers, a group of workers who now have the choice of nasty SIPTU, a previous breakaway union, the NBRU, or the IWU. Now, I’m all for any group of workers seeking to improve their conditions, but Dublin Bus drivers are not on a bad wage: ask them. Private-sector drivers, though, are often on appalling money and subjected to excessive hours and bullying. Is the IWU doing the hard work of organising in that sector? If not, why not?

So, as with the NBRU before it, what passes for IWU strategy is recruiting public-sector workers who are already members of other unions. As a business proposition that may have much to recommend it, but as an approach to building workers’ power it is somewhere between utterly cynical and downright potty.

The only place for trade unionists and socialists is with the organised working class. And they’re in nasty SIPTU, the ATGWU, Amicus and the rest. They’re never going to join the IWU en masse. N.E.V.E.R. Is there anyone who thinks that they are? Is the IWU even asking unorganised workers to join? It’s a lot easier to work from disgruntled members who are already sold on the ideas of trade unionism than to take the fight to the bosses of non-union Ireland. Embarking on a voyage that you know can end only in failure is both futile and self-indulgent.

Larkin, the old hero of the new IWU, stood for ‘One Big Union’. The IWU stands for ‘One Small Union’. Workers don’t leave their organisations easily, even if they know that they are deeply flawed, as nasty SIPTU and the other ICTU unions indeed are. In practice, what they do is leave the union movement altogether, usually when they move from a unionised employment to a non-union job. The IWU is an irrelevance to the job of transforming the Congress unions into fighting, organising, campaigning bodies focused on gaining power in the private as well as the public sector.
When the IWU’s activists see that their enterprise isn’t going to work – and it’ll be ordinary workers refusing to join their union that will do the showing, not Bertie Ahern and David Beggs cooking up some conspiracy – they, too, will become disillusioned and likely drop out of activity. The existing unions are doing a good enough job of kicking the enthusiasm for struggle out of people without the IWU joining in!

Socialists should forgo purity and self-righteousness for the construction of militant unionism. And that means starting the hard slog of organising within the existing trade unions and organising through those unions in workplaces. 30% of nasty SIPTU members who voted in the recent ballot wanted to reject stage 2 of Sustaining Progress. 30% of nasty SIPTU’s membership is about 70,000. I don’t think that’s such a bad place to start from. In building a militant workers’ movement, I’d much rather start there than from whatever the IWU’s (undisclosed) membership figure is.