The world of work has changed radically from when the modern trade union movement came into being at the end of the 19th century, but the fundamental reason why workers need unions has not. If anything, the intensification of work, the fragmentation of employment and the growing power of capital mean that collective organisation is even more necessary today.
Workers today are dispersed across smaller workplaces and supply chains, and have myriad contractual arrangements. Many work remotely. Others work through platforms. Technology increasingly mediates the relationship between worker and employer. Yet beneath all those differences there is a common experience: an intensification of the labour process.
The question is, with union density – the percentage of the workforce who are union members – hovering in the low twenties, what does the trade union movement need to do to advance the interests of labour in this new era of digital capital?
My own introduction to trade unionism came in Bord na Móna in the late 1980s when a group of women I worked alongside ‘downed tools’ after hearing that I was to be laid off. Other workers joined them and the workplace was brought to a standstill. This act of solidarity ultimately saved my job. But more importantly their actions instilled in me a belief in the power of collective action which has remained with me ever since.
For over three decades as a SIPTU organiser however, I have also become increasingly conscious of the tendency for those of us who work for trade unions to become consumed by the immediate battle; resolving the dispute, or dealing with the ever-present crisis at hand. We can become problem-solvers rather than movement-builders. The most urgent always trumps the most important thing to do.
In a reflective article in the New Left Review earlier this year, tracing the huge changes in French society throughout his own lifetime, the French political theorist Régis Debray wrote: “When you don’t know where you’re going, look where you came from.” Applying this dictum to the trade union movement would not mean attempting to recreate the trade union movement of a century ago, nor would it mean retreating into nostalgia (an unhealthy addiction of many on the left). Rather, it means understanding what made the movement successful in the first place and applying these lessons in the contemporary world of work.
Where we came from
Every trade union movement is shaped by the society from which it first emerged. Thus, Irish trade unionism developed distinctive characteristics of its own. Our history is much richer than the familiar story of Larkin, Connolly and the 1913 Lockout. The roots of Irish trade unionism are as much rural as they are urban, arguably more so. Farm labourers accounted for more than one fifth of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union’s (ITGWU) membership in 1918. The organising tactics of the fledgling movement also borrowed from the traditions and tactics of the Land War of the previous century, and the long history of agrarian agitation associated with land rights.
The sympathetic strike, for example, the tactic most associated with Larkinism, was essentially an industrial adaptation of the boycott. The movement grew because it found forms of organisation and tactics socially acceptable to the people it sought to organise. The philosophy was One Big Union (OBU). It recognised that workers who possessed little economic power individually could combine their strength to confront forces much more powerful than themselves. It was self-policing by necessity: the only effective weapon when confronting a much larger force was to ensure that every worker was a union member.
In the Land War it was the ‘land-grabber’, not the landlord per se, who the power of the collective was turned against. The peasant farmer who dared take up the land of an evicted tenant risked total ostracisation from their community. Most of the titanic industrial disputes of the early 20th century were won or lost on the principle of establishing the ‘closed shop’.
Up until the 1980s it was not unusual to have disputes where union members would refuse to work with someone who was not a union member; echoes of the treatment of ‘land-grabbers’ reverberating within factory walls. Tactics such as the boycott or closed shop were not only very effective social control mechanisms; they were also the fundamental building blocks which led to the establishment of strong collective institutions which successfully challenged very uneven societal power relationships.
The challenge facing the contemporary trade union movement is twofold: how do we rebuild institutional strength in the age of digital capital and how do we redesign our organisations in a way that younger workers will connect with? It cannot simply mean preserving the existing union institutions.
It is true to say that throughout most of the 20th century the structure, form, culture and tactics of trade unions changed and adapted to the mutating nature of capital. For example, tens of thousands of administrative and clerical workers joined what was ostensibly a ‘blue collar’ movement in the latter part of the 20th century and the movement accommodated them and was changed by their incorporation. But undoubtedly the movement has struggled as the factory has given way first to financialisation and now a digital world of capital.
From radicalism to social partnership
The Irish trade union movement transitioned from a radical syndicalist phase in the early part of the century adopting a more reformist outlook throughout the course of the century, growing in institutional strength as union membership became the norm amongst all types of workers. The movement won enormous achievements for working people. Improving wages, winning ‘rights’; from paid holidays, reductions in the working week, equal pay, maternity leave, sick pay, overtime. ‘Rights’ many workers now take for granted. Collective bargaining became established across large parts of the economy. Employment protections expanded and unions became recognised participants in national economic and social debates. Today, the only time when you hear from a trade union representative on the airwaves is in the context of an industrial dispute.
But institutional growth also brought unintended consequences. From the 1970s onwards, employment law increasingly provided individual legal remedies for problems that had previously generated collective workplace responses. A dismissal that might once have resulted in a spontaneous stoppage could now be pursued through an employment-rights procedure.
Progressive employment legislation is obviously something unions should fight for. But ‘rights’ and ‘collective power’ are not the same thing. If every workplace problem is converted into an individual grievance, there is a danger that the worker becomes a client rather than an active participant in their union. There has also been a tendency towards centralised collective bargaining in the state. A return to centralised collective bargaining typically occurs during an economic crisis and/or during periods of increased worker militancy.
Social partnership (1987–2009) was the most advanced model of this tendency, which emerged out of the extraordinarily difficult economic circumstances of the 1980s. Social partnership undoubtedly delivered real gains. It helped deliver significant pay improvements, reduce/rebalance tax burdens for PAYE workers and brought about industrial stability. But it also profoundly changed the culture of Irish trade unionism. Irish workers were among the most strike-prone in Europe during the 1960s and 1970s but organised labour by the end of the social partnership period had been becalmed. The general attitude to strikes had been transformed. They were no longer a common phenomenon; they had become rare and extreme events.
The economic crash of 2008 should have triggered a much deeper examination of the social partnership model. The one-day stoppage by public sector workers on 24th November 2009 could have been the starting point for a major debate about the future direction of Irish trade unionism, but regrettably that debate never really happened. Union density in Ireland peaked at around 62% in the early 1980s. By 2022 it stood at 23%. It has oscillated around this level ever since. Of course, over this period of decline from the 1980s on, income inequality increased dramatically across western economies. These developments are intrinsically linked.
Hollowing out
The trade union movement’s response to decline has often been framed as a choice between an “organising model” and a “servicing model” of trade unionism. That debate has its uses, but it is way too narrow and reductive. SIPTU went through a huge organisational restructuring in 2010. It stood down a local branch network, and reorganised on industry lines. This brought significant co-ordination to collective bargaining strategies, but we lost many of our local links and influence at parish level. In retrospect we did not pay sufficient attention to the transformation taking place in the contemporary world of work and we ignored, to a large extent, lessons from our own history.
Historian Anton Jäger has written about the structural changes which took place in the political landscape over the last two decades and more specifically in the structure of political organisations. He describes the emergence of the popular form of politics which took root after the economic crash of 2008 as ‘hyperpolitics’:
"New genres of politics crystallized and old ones were remade: Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn, Sanders, Black Lives Matter, La France insoumise on the left; on the right, Golden Dawn, Vox, Farage, MAGA and Le Pen. Much of this remained a mode of engagement modelled on online life-worlds, characterised by volatile swarms and high emotions: ‘wars of manoeuvre’... frenetic cycles of outrage and burn-out; followers and witch hunts. Its electoral interventions were usually dependent on an influencer-style figurehead with outsize grip over the organisation … It was immediatist, rather than planning for the generations to come; focused on online messaging more than physical infrastructure. For all its furore, the hyperpolitical mode lacked the mass-political tools – above all, strong party forms – to effect concrete change."
In explaining the context which has given rise to this transition in political forms of expression he points to the aggressive marketisation of everyday life, the atomisation of civil society and the decline of mass-membership organisations which has occurred over the last four decades. This has, he concludes, resulted in a “popular de-institutionalisation” for citizens and workers.
For generations, unions were among the institutions through which working people participated collectively in society. The decline in mass membership of trade unions is part of a wider erosion of collective life and people’s trust in institutions. This sense of atomisation may have begun earlier but it gained real momentum at the start of the 1980s with the neoliberal revolution of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Her infamous affirmation, “there is no such thing as society”, has been given radical effect in the virtual world.
Making membership the default
Yet the trade union movement has shown itself to be incredibly resilient. Despite the significant decline in trade union density, there are still over 700,000 trade union members in Ireland. It is still the largest civil society movement on this island. Its infrastructure has proven durable in the more traditional parts of the economy; the public sector, utilities, manufacturing. But how do you use this collective power in the face of digital capital? What are the practical ways in which this collective power could be ‘re-institutionalised’?
One area where the trade union movement missed an opportunity to do just this was in relation to the state’s auto-enrolment pension scheme. The trade union movement should have fought to have become a provider. It is important to note that among the few countries in the industrialised world which did not suffer acute levels of union decline were the Scandinavian states. This is primarily because the trade union movement has a significant role in the provision of social security.
We need to make union membership as normal for younger workers as auto-enrolment has made pension scheme membership. The introduction of auto-enrolment has flipped attitudes to pension cover. You are now the outsider if you are not in. Joining a union should not be viewed as an unusual or even confrontational act but all too often in the private sector, workers are met with outright employer hostility. It should be an entirely normal part of entering working life, as it was for me when I first joined the workforce in the 1980s.
The Government has an important role to play in this regard. The Government is the largest employer in the country. If it were to adopt a default union membership approach – i.e. workers would automatically become union members when taking up employment with the state, with the right to opt out – this could send a powerful message to private employers. Closed shops have been successfully contested in the courts on constitutional grounds; default union membership would overcome this impediment.
The present Government, regrettably, has adopted a minimalist approach to the EU directive on adequate minimum wages and collective bargaining. Do I think that it will do this anytime soon? I very much doubt it, but we need to ensure that opposition parties are on board with the idea. Such a structural change would be a gamechanger for trade unions as it would unleash badly needed finances to organise in the more hostile areas of the economy.
Evidence shows that younger workers are not inherently individualistic or hostile to unions. Younger workers, the age group with the lowest union density, have also been found to be the group most positively disposed towards joining a trade union according to the Union voice in Ireland research published by John Geary and María Belizón. That should give us considerable grounds for optimism. But if younger workers are notionally positively disposed to trade unions, why are they not joining in large numbers? Employer hostility is a significant issue, undoubtedly, as I have touched on. But, it is also because the movement has not yet developed forms of trade unionism that sufficiently reflect their working lives.
Of course, many younger workers experience conditions with remarkable similarities to those which gave rise to modern trade unionism in the first place: casualisation, insecurity, precarious employment and enormous economic inequality. We need to give them the space and power to build a trade unionism that belongs to them. In my own union there are sectors where younger workers have been developing their own unique union culture; embracing technology in innovative ways, engaging enthusiastically in wider political and social justice issues where more traditional parts of the union may not. We need to ensure that unions are welcoming places, that we do not stifle new organic union cultures from below.
One big union
The great achievement of the ‘new unionism’ of the late 19th century was not that its organisers discovered one perfect organisational model and handed it down to future generations. They looked at the workers, communities and economic structures around them and created forms of organisation capable of building collective power in those circumstances. Yes, a lot has changed in the world of work but the fundamental imbalance between workers and the economic power confronting them has not disappeared. Neither has the kind of solidarity I experienced as a younger man all those years ago.
One Big Union, the founding principle of my union, must be understood not as a relic or slogan from our past, but as a principle and guiding light for our future: the recognition that workers advance their individual interests most effectively through collective strength. There is a degree of enlightened self-interest in that idea. We join together because we understand that if you don’t support others when they need you, they may not be there for you. That was true when the early organisers of the Irish labour movement went into docks, factories, farms and communities to build a movement among workers who had previously been considered impossible to organise. It remains true in the digital, fragmented and increasingly individualised world of work today. Our task is to make it real for a new generation.
Adrian Kane is the SIPTU Deputy General Secretary for the Public Service. Some of the ideas expressed in this article are contained in his previous publication, Trade Unions (Cork University Press, 2023). As of October 2026, he is leading SIPTU members’ industrial action in the public service.