President Michael D Higgins address to Biennial Conference
Is mian liom i dtosach báire mo bhuíochas a ghabháil libh as an gcuireadh a sheol sibh chugam a bheith libh ag pointe stairiúil inár saol mar Cheardchumann anois agus as an bpribhléíd oráid a dhéanamh inniu i gCill Chainnigh ag coinfearadh débhliantúil seo Comhdháil Éireannach na gCeardchumann. Sé bliain ó shin an uair dheireannach a thug mé aitheasc don Chomhdháil Ceardchumainn ag Lárionad Comhdhála an Fhoirgnimh Chóimeála i mBéal Feirste.
[May I begin by saying how pleased I am to be invited to address you here today in Kilkenny, the medieval city, at the biennial conference of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. It is six years to the day since I last addressed your Union Conference at the Assembly Building Conference Centre in Belfast].
Whenever I address the ICTU conference, I am reminded of some of the earliest decisions of my life, and one that I have never regretted: joining the union. I have been a member of a trade union for 60 years, and a founding member of the Education branch, first of the Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI), which became the Federated Workers Union of Ireland and finally SIPTU since the merge in 1990. Via Equity, the IGTWU and SIPTU, Sabina, the companion of my life’s union activity, was making her own way.
May I commence by thanking your General Secretary, Owen Reidy, and your President, Kevin Callinan, for the invitation to speak here this morning.
I do want in a special way to congratulate Esther Lynch, our mutual friend and former ICTU official, who was elected as the General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation at its Congress in Berlin in May.
Esther, who will address your conference tomorrow morning, has led the ETUC negotiations that led to the Adequate Minimum Wages Directive, which provides trade unions with a great opportunity to expand both union density and collective bargaining coverage. Esther also led the union team that helped deliver the Gender Pay Transparency Directive. This Directive will be central discussions already underway between participants.
Yes, it provides important new tools that unions and those with whom they work in partnership can use to address the gender pay gap, but, much more, it defines and calls for the skills that the partnership for a new form of economy requires of all partners in the future. We all wish her every success in her new role.
Kilkenny is such an apposite location for your biennial conference. Home to Nixie Boran, the social revolutionary, miners’ leader, trade unionist and nationalist, Boran played a key role in revolutionising Castlecomer’s coal miners in the 1930s.
He had the qualities of conviction, the ability to inspire and an extraordinary courage when up against intransigence. He also demonstrated an ability to read the circumstances and the consequences and to compromise when necessary. His value system was based on reading, study, discussion on every aspect of the struggle for equality, fairness and intolerance of oppression.
May I suggest that such qualities and values are required now more than ever as we face the multiple challenges of our contemporary circumstances, both at home and globally. Trade unionists in the coming decades will be going into discussions, going on media, writing, speaking on no narrow defensive agenda, but on every aspect of the citizenship that new forms of economy, social justice and ecology demand.
Your movement, with approximately 800,000 members in 44 affiliated unions, north and south of the border, is Ireland’s largest civic society body. Your contribution to the evolution of politics, economy and society in every part of this island has been essential and it has been emancipatory in so many ways, and, as a highly skilled movement, will be part of the defining of the future and all the more important for its international roll.
It is a movement borne out of a long, determined, hard-fought battle, with a history in Ireland dating back to the eighteenth century, when local societies were established in the cities to represent craftsman such as bricklayers, butchers and printers.
From about 1889 a new type of union began to emerge in Ireland, one whose aim was to organise the mass of skilled workers, with separate unions covering specific worker types, such as dockers, railwaymen and general workers, being established in these years, with branches springing up across Ireland. It blossoms with mass membership and united action.
The Irish Trade Union Congress was founded in 1894, three years after the death of Parnell, with a stated aim to act as the collective voice of organised Irish labour, and quickly saw the need of a political arm known as the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress.
Central to that movement was Thomas Johnson, whose death occurred 60 years ago this year. I was delighted to hold a tree-planting ceremony in his honour in April in Áras an Uachtaráin to mark his many achievements. That tree is across from the Starry Plough tribute to Sean O’Casey, the Citizen Army and the victims of the 1913 Lockout.
At various times Tom Johnson was the president, treasurer and secretary of the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress before the modern-day Labour Party, founded by James Connolly and James Larkin in 1912 in Clonmel.
Johnson is also to be remembered for organising a successful strike in conjunction with other members of the Irish anti-conscription movement as well as being a voice for the defeated revolutionaries of the independence movement. It was he who raised prisoners’ conditions and the extra-judicial killings, gave support for ending the Civil War, called for the return of the Dáil.
Ireland’s record in the area of workers’ rights is a proud and celebrated one, one which now dates back over a century and is perhaps most famously documented through the 1913 Lockout, that major industrial confrontation between approximately 20,000 workers and 300 employers that took place in Dublin from 26th August 1913 to 18th January 1914, and is correctly viewed as a foundational industrial dispute in Irish history.
The Lockout occurred within a most challenging context as a World War was fermenting, and as from multiple sources the desire for independence in Ireland was continuing to gain ground. It was a time of agitated and urgent organisation on a number of themes – a cultural revival, a nationalist revival, and a suggested labour awakening. There was not only a sense of urgency and determination, but also of class clashes that would deepen.
As we come to the centenary of 1923 and 1924, we see now class divides not only in urban settings but on the land issue. It is Tom Johnson and Michael Duffy who pen a minority report to the Agriculture Commission Report of 1924. Paragraph 71 reads:
“The Majority Report contains the error of treating every holder of agricultural land as an agriculturalist and the farming community as homogenous. The Majority overlook the difference between the small farmer who employs his own family labour and supplies a local market, and the large farmer who depends wholly on wage labour and sells his produce for export. Their interests may differ acutely as when, for instance, a proposal involving local employment of labour is raised. The small farmer would benefit by a local demand for labour at high wages because thereby his home market is improved; the large farmer may lose because of competition for labour and the effect on the wages of his own labourers. Equally well marked may be the difference of interest between the tillage farmer and the grazier” .
In the choice between tillage and cattle, the graziers won. The boat was now the option for the landless, the agricultural labourers, the recently released prisoners.
We now live in a world with the deepest challenges, where climate change has become a reality as our planet burns, scarred by its insatiable exploitation, with all the attendant biodiversity loss so evident.
Global poverty and inequality are rising. Hunger and famine are increasing, particularly in Eastern Africa. War has returned to our continent of Europe with devastating consequences for the Ukrainian people, while the armaments industry prospers. A cost-of-living crisis across Europe shows little sign of abating, hitting individuals and families hard and causing great hardship.
At an institutional level, the discussion on the threat to democracy is urgent with the rise of the opportunity to fuel old hatreds. The rise and rise of the unaccountable constitutes the most significant threat to democracy, even in what describes itself as the ‘developed’ world, thriving in an elusory system of power that has shed any accountability to those it was meant to help and govern. From interference in election systems, to companies buying better ratings from ratings agencies, to the extreme influence of lobbyists, all are, to quote Janine Wedel,
“embodying a ‘new corruption’ and remain unaccountable to our society’s supposed watchdogs, which sit idly alongside the same groups that have brought the government, business and much of the military into their pocket” .
Such a trend is among those fuelling the rise of the far right, with its exclusionary, reactionary ideology a cause for the greatest concern. I am so glad that you are debating this issue during your conference.
We must not be afraid to call this movement for what it is: a politics of fear through the sowing of the seeds of hatred, one that is focused on the oppression of the ‘Other’, a political movement which has in the past been the source of policies of forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority.
Such ultra-nationalisms, authoritarianisms and exploitation of ignorance and bogus certainties have produced tendencies, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, transphobic, and reactionary views which, it is easy to say, have no place in our tolerant, pluralist contemporary Irish society. They have no place in our contemporary European society. How open are these societies? How actual is the deepening of democracy, the sharing of discourse, transparency, openness to change?
Education and dialogue among the general population to help prevent hateful and exclusive attitudes is important. I am heartened when I, as Uachtarán na hÉireann, attend events in schools throughout the country and witness first hand schools with up to 35 nationalities working harmoniously together. This is a model that should be rolled out across the education system and indeed into the workplace. We must, all of us, voice our abhorrence of intolerant speech, in whatever media it appears.
Trade unions are functioning as the vanguard in facing up to this threat, a threat to democracy itself. Trade unions are championing and promoting values of inclusion, respect and equality, being proactive in denouncing any group that stirs hateful division, propagates misinformation. Trade unions must be steadfast in challenging the various forms of hate and discrimination when and where they appear; after all, that is their legacy.
Ensuring that we have a society that remains open and welcoming is of grave importance in the context of the arrival of displaced people seeking asylum and refuge, many of whom are desperate and vulnerable, and some of whom have not received the welcome for which we Irish are known.
Workers – and I wish I did not have to repeat it so often – continue to be exploited around the world. The International Labour Organisation tells us that 49.6 million people were living in modern slavery in 2021, of which 27.6 million were in forced labour and 22 million in forced marriage. Of the 27.6 million people in forced labour, 17.3 million are exploited in the private sector, 6.3 million in forced commercial sexual exploitation, and 3.9 million in forced state-imposed labour.
Women and girls account for 4.9 million of those in forced commercial sexual exploitation, and for 6 million of those in forced labour in other economic sectors. Some 12 percent of all those in forced labour are children. More than half of these children are in commercial sexual exploitation.
On all of these issues, it is trade unions who are demanding that trade advantage, other sectoral issues, must not take precedence over issues of rights.
As global citizens, we are required to respond to such facts, deeply disturbing as they are, informed by our own past, and those who assisted us, but conscious too of the benefits that we have achieved in the past century as a result of those with the moral courage to seek, establish and vindicate the rights of workers.
Unions know only too well of the impacts that the arrival and announcement of cost-of-living crises is causing on individuals, households and families nationwide. With inflation running at levels not seen in four decades, we are witnessing a reduction in workers’ real incomes which is making life increasingly difficult for so many, with impacts on wellbeing, including increased anxiety and worsening mental health, as workers, particularly low-paid workers, struggle with making ends meet.
We need complete transparency on the research and what is guiding policy choices as well as drivers of this inflation. Is it unreasonable to ask of the European Central Bank that it publishes the informing papers of its analysis of inflation? We are witnessing a particular of non-investing profit-driven inflation bring fuelled perhaps by sky-rocketing corporation profits, an inflation that is corrosive and has the potential, if it continues, to deepen and circulate poverty, deprivation and inequality levels.
Individuals and families on state benefits, including pensioners who have given their working lives to the State, those workers on a modest fixed income, those with high energy needs, those at the mercy of a precarious rental market, and those with tracker and variable-rate mortgages have all been hurt the most by this inflation, while others – including corporations, their shareholders and those with large portfolios of assets such as property – may actually become wealthier in a high-inflation environment.
In addition to the cost-of-living crisis, among the most important labour policy challenges unions are facing today include risks from ongoing globalisation and international competition from states with cheaper labour and poorer enforcement of workers’ rights, demographic changes and an ageing workforce, technological changes, including digitalisation and automation via elements such as the sharing economy, and the impact of climate change and its consequences on jobs and the environment.
As we deal with these great issues of a structural nature, we must ask ourselves some difficult questions in our post-Covid circumstances. Have we learned the lessons from the pandemic, that hard-earned wisdom which came at such a great cost, especially in relation to how we value our frontline workers and those delivering essential services, and has it been translated into strong scholarship, policy options, and institutional frameworks that can serve a new political economy and galvanise workers’ rights?
I regret to say that I am not convinced. How regrettable it would be if, through some form of collective amnesia, we as a society now disregard the efforts of these workers, and revert to where we were before the crisis – a society that too often failed to value our essential workers.
I think in particular of carers and how those providing care have been under-valued for so long. The lack of respite care for people has been a very distressing development recently, and with Census 2022 figures showing a marked increase in unpaid carers – over 299,000 people identify as unpaid carers, up 53 percent since Census 2016 – we have much to do here in policy terms to ensure that care is valued and carers are supported appropriately.
We require a transformation in how we think of public expenditure, of State investment, of the public sector in general, all of which is too often described pejoratively as a cost or a burden in a country which demonstrates a relatively low level of per-capita public spending compared to other European countries . Public expenditure must become regarded as an investment in our communities, our society and our economy.
It would be all too easy to fall into despair given the multiple concurrent crises we face, but my aim today is to offer some hope, for there are chinks of light that must guide our response to tackling these crises, offering a new way of shared existence on this our shared and increasingly vulnerable planet.
The overall objective of Congress is to strive to achieve such a restructuring of economic and social development, social cohesion and justice by upholding the values of relations as will produce solidarity, fairness and equality. May I say that a new form of political economy that has emerged over the past decade and has gained traction on the streets of Europe offers our best – perhaps our only – hope for the achievement of such an objective.
An eco-social paradigm, such as that advocated by many scholars, but perhaps most convincingly by Ian Gough , Tim Jackson and Mary Murphy , based on economic heterodoxy and rooted in ecological economics, recognises the importance of acknowledging the limits of the world’s natural resources. It recognises the role that unrestrained greed has played in creating the climate crisis and our current state of ecosystems collapse, in which almost half of Earth’s species are now in decline, as we continue in the Anthropocene towards a sixth potential human-induced mass extinction .
The suggested new paradigm offers a better connection between economics, ecological sustainability and ethics. It recognises the growth fallacy, a concept that is contradictory in itself. In the words of Tim Jackson:
“Growth means more throughput. More throughput means more impact. More impact means less planet. Eternal growth precipitates the destruction of everything” .
It recognises the depth of the change that is required, envisaging a more equal and moral society, one in which the State is seen as a provider of quality universal services for its citizens, services that are seen as an investment in society rather than a burden.
It recognises that policies must simultaneously pursue both equity and social justice as well as sustainability and sufficiency goals within an activist, innovative State that ensures better planning, regulation and enforcement.
It recognises the important role that investing in nature can play in achieving a more sustainable, resilient, and healthy world. All of this also offers a much more active, participatory, fulfilling version of society than one where citizenship is defined as licence to insatiable consumption.
The trade union movement has a lead role in bringing into being this new sustainable economy founded on accountability, offering an alternative to the growing realm of unaccountable corporations and greed which has fuelled the climate crisis. As well as being a factor in the rise of populist ideologies, including the far right, inequality is at the heart of the ecological dystopia we face, one that now poses an existential threat. Most economists publishing recently recognise that current levels of income and wealth inequality are “neither tolerable in a democracy, nor efficient from an economic point of view, that they aggravate public health risks affecting the whole of society, […] and have potentially devastating consequences for the environment”, as Lucas Chancel has argued .
Just as the most effective welfare States in the world promote universalism as a core principle, an effective eco-social paradigm requires a universalist mindset. This is fundamental as a compass, as are additional, targeted measures to mitigate against any regressive impacts of decarbonisation policies on lower income groups, or cohorts who will be impacted most adversely by the shift to a low-carbon economy and society – such as, for example, those losing jobs resulting from the closure of legacy industries.
In Ireland this will mean a just transition must be achieved for those impacted by the closure of unsustainable carbon-intensive electricity production, for example, or those engaged in resource extraction, who must be offered re-skilling opportunities to enable them to find suitable jobs in other areas, such as the green economy, or upskilling opportunities that can achieve sustainable incomes in other parts of society.
A model for such a just transition has been made available to us by the National Economic and Social Council, whose 2020 Report (Number 149) provides a framework within which the transition to a new political economy may be a just transition .
Participative decision-making models are so important. The People’s Transition, TASC’s recent report, is a welcome contribution to the growing body of scholarship advocating such an approach . The report makes the case for viewing climate action as an enabler of local development, giving people and communities ownership of the transition to zero-carbon societies, and enhancing public support for a just transition by tackling inequality and raising standards of living through the delivery of climate solutions. Policies that promote real regionalism can also be central to a just decarbonisation.
Out of respect for those who have suffered greatly, in particular owing to the recent Covid pandemic, those who have lost their lives and indeed the bereaved families, we must not drift into some notion that we seek to recover what we had previously as any sufficient resolution—that we should regard it as sufficient response to what now we face, that we merely revert to the insecurity of where we were before, through mere superficial adjustment of fiscal- and monetary-policy parameters.
We have to do better. We must exit the paradigm that has failed, that has been so socially ruinous. We must envision and give substance to the alternative. A brighter horizon must be put forward which offers opportunity and hope, one that carries an intellectual energy informed by a shared moral purpose borne out of our interlocking contemporary crises, one that fosters a new social contract between citizen and state
The achievement of a more inclusive and just society requires the sharing of risks more collectively, broadening out opportunities so that everyone can fulfil their potential. A social contract founded on the key elements of collectivism, solidarity and harmony, one that recognises our interdependencies, supports and invests more in each other, will assist in the building of a more inclusive, cohesive society together.
As to other challenges facing trade unions, may I suggest that continued efforts be made at increasing the coverage of membership in under-represented sectors, including caring, hospitality, aviation, information and communication, and manufacturing and construction (all of which have a unionisation rate below 20 percent) .
I suggest that trade unions, in reasserting their relevance, must look beyond their traditional heartlands and seek to attract workers in new areas of work, including in the gig economy, where limited presence has been achieved to date.
Yes, there is much to celebrate today. The growth in female participation in the labour market is matched by growing numbers of women joining trade unions. Indeed, more women than men are now members of trade unions.
Support for union representation among non-union employees is
noteworthy: as many as 40 percent of non-union workers would be willing to vote to establish a union in their workplace, according to recent research by UCD. Young workers are particularly well disposed to seeking union representation.That same research also found that Irish trade union members are positively disposed towards union membership, value being members, and are committed to retaining union representation. Four out of every five members would vote to maintain the union in their workplace .However, union membership overall is in decline, and the coverage of collective bargaining, now perhaps covering two-fifths of the workforce, has fallen over the past two decades from when coverage applied to half the workforce . Membership remains heavily age-dependent, with only 14 percent of young workers (those aged 16-24) in a union compared to 45 percent of those aged 55-64 . Citizenship requires recruiting, action, upskilling, collective celebration, togetherness in all its forms.
Improved coverage of union membership, across all sectors, genders, ages, locations and social classes, is an inter-generational challenge for us all, one that requires leadership in particular at grassroots level across the trade unions.
It is critical that we continue to support measures, including through the multilateral institutions, to address, inter alia, deficits in decent work in the informal economy, as part of broader efforts towards economic formalisation, which must be a priority for progress against forced labour.
I am delighted that your conference today will debate these and other employment rights’ issues, such as the ‘right to disconnect’, which has never been more important than in our post-pandemic hybrid and remote working model.
I have every faith that the trade union movement in Ireland will continue to play that critical, indeed pivotal, role vindicating workers’ rights, both at home and in solidarity with those around the world, as it has done since its inception.
The union voice is needed now more than ever as we battle multiple crises in a rapidly changing world. The movement is in a better space than it has been for years but still faces challenges, including from the most powerful. There has arguably never been a more appropriate, more exciting time to be a part of the trade union movement for a future of equality, justice and sustainability, one that will carry the imprint of the trade union’s emancipatory imprint.
Let us all commit to actively playing our part in the creation of a society that removes the obstacles standing between so many of our people and their full participation. Let us commit to valuing those heroic workers who have risked their lives and their security to support us in recent times. Let us keep defending their rights as Tom Johnson and the other founders of the trade union movement did over a century ago.
