The Industrial Relations Act (1990) and the threat to democracy

Many workers and union organisers in Ireland are aware of a piece of legislation called the Industrial Relations Act (1990). However, in my experience as an active union member and shop steward, few workers are familiar with the implications of the law for unions, worker power, and democracy.

A few elements of the Industrial Relations Act (1990) can illustrate how the capitalists, the state, and union bureaucracy are able to more effectively control what workers do and how they engage in class struggle. These forces cooperate to make Ireland more accommodating to preserving “industrial peace” which takes the shape of a one-sided class war.

One aspect of the law restricts industrial action to “any action which affects, or is likely to affect, the terms of conditions, whether express or implied, of a contract” which greatly diminishes the ability for workers to influence other areas of their workplace or even wider society particularly through actions like boycotts or political and solidarity strikes.

A more alarming aspect of the law is Section 14 which literally dictates a provision that the rules of any “authorised trade union” (another restrictive measure) must contain. Section 14 forbids any industrial action that isn’t preceded by a secret ballot. This means no wildcat strikes, no simple majorities in a workplace, and adds time to an already lengthy process before a strike is even considered. In addition to this, if a strike is voted for by members, the executive can disregard it. If they support it, they must give the employer notice of no less than one week of its intention to disrupt production. How any trade union official could consider it appropriate for the state to insert provisions in their own internal rules is deeply worrying. These rules must also be submitted to the Registry of Friendly Societies to ensure compliance. 

Unions are also required to submit their membership numbers to the state which can easily tip the balance of power to employers where density is low, altering the trajectory of negotiations and weakening the position of workers.

These are only a couple of examples of what is contained in the law, and they may not seem like much, but taken as part of wider assault on workers’ rights and democracy, the consequences are immense.

The period following the implementation of the Industrial Relations Act (1990) saw a decline in union membership, the share of wealth going to workers in wages, and the number of days lost due to industrial action. If the purpose of Ireland’s legislative context with respect to workers power and democracy is to make it difficult to achieve either, then it’s working. Despite a handful of notable events, the general trajectory of union power is unambiguously one of failure and decline.

In its most basic and most charitable form, the Industrial Relations Act (1990) is a set of rules that regulate how unions operate in Ireland to support what is known as “industrial peace” or the cooperation between workers, capitalists, and the state. This framework of cooperation is commonly referred to as “social partnership” and promotes the idea that workers, capitalists, and the state are better off when they work together to achieve economic growth and reduce awareness of contradictions in capitalism and the state that enforces it, and what can be done to overcome that system.

Put simply, contradictions refer to concepts like profit motive which demands an employer pay a worker engaged in commodity production only enough to purchase the commodities a worker needs to continue selling their labour. Constant growth demands that production increases which causes commodity prices to fall which can in turn drive down the cost of labour. The more abundant a commodity becomes, the more expensive it becomes for the worker.

In a modern globalised service economy like 21st century Ireland, an employee might be paid more than their actual work might suggest, but only because the underlying productive economics occurs elsewhere. Someone in the financial sector might not produce anything at all, but they are able to charge fees in exchange for services to a company like Amazon which depends on driving the cost of labour downward by exploiting markets around the world and squeezing margins along the supply-chain. Those fees, which the professional in Ireland sees as the product of their own labour, are actually generated by someone else’s labour. It should be noted that these contradictions do not always appear simply as political goods and evils, they are simply realities of liberal capitalism. For example, health and safety regulations or minimum wage laws violate principles of free-market ideology while simultaneously concentrating wealth in fewer hands. Nevertheless, such regulations might also be demands of the working class.

When workers become aware of the contradictions inherent in the capitalist mode of production and develop a political ideology it is known as class consciousness. Class consciousness is necessary (but not sufficient) for the working class to set about resolving these contradictions and taking control of their own destiny. For socialists, this is called a revolution.

The managers of the Irish state, both representative and professional, know this better than most workers, and so they design frameworks like the Industrial Relations Act (1990) in order to prevent workers from realising their potential as a class and building a society that challenges the power and wealth of capitalists.

The title of the law indicates a specific moment in history that is immediately identifiable as significant for its content and purpose. Nineteen-ninety saw the end of Thatcher’s term as Prime Minister of Britain and the neo-liberal era was in full swing. Neoliberalism in both Thatcher’s Britain and Reagan’s US was marked by a period of brutal anti-unionism, gutting of public services, and an increase in state-power (particularly in terms of policing, war, and security) to further the power of private capital over the state.

Neoliberalism is not, as some describe it, the mere retreat or dismantling of the state in so much as it is a more direct use of state power to advance the aims of capital at the expense of basic services like housing and health. In the US, public housing has all but disappeared but military spending always increases. This increase is funnelled into profits of corporate juggernauts in the military-industrial-complex and used in imperialist military actions around the world.

Ireland, a much smaller and less consequential state on the global stage, did not mimic the neoliberal trend entirely (social welfare spending increased in Ireland when other governments were dismantling their social democratic institutions after the dissolution of the Soviet Union), but developed important enabling conditions for what became known as the Celtic Tiger.

The Industrial Relations Act (1990) reflected an environment that favoured business and global capital by selling the nation as a predictable place to operate because the state could more easily control workers and unions and limit their potential threat. Few would argue that the experience of the Dunnes Store workers who went on strike in 1984 because they refused to handle products from apartheid South Africa  didn’t play a part in the kinds of limitations that would eventually end up codified into law. Although it was in no way a straight-forward process, in defiance of capitalists, the state, and even union bosses, a small group of only eleven workers managed to force Ireland to ban the importation of South African goods in 1987. The state could not permit this to happen again and union bosses needed to be able to police their own members and concentrate authority in executive committees and away from workplaces.

To be clear, it is not only due to the law. The tradition of militant labour and the revolutionary potential of the working class needs to be brought back to the trade union movement in Ireland. The Industrial Relations Act (1990) and related legislation is only one piece of a more complex coercive apparatus that the state and union bosses use to police workers and severely limit the ability for workers to use their most effective weapon – the ability to remove their labour from the market to influence society.

As a mechanism to organise workers and begin to fight back against the power of the capitalist state and its willing partners in the union bureaucracy, the legislative framework needs to be highlighted and attacked. Workers need to organise themselves in unions to build autonomy and revive a militant tradition. Where union bosses attempt to sideline workers, or brush off their demands as delusional, or limit democracy, they need to be challenged.  The more union members target and fight back against the legislative restrictions, the more it will drag out those in leadership to face off against their own membership. The more workers realise how they’re being controlled, the better equipped they will be to dismantle those controls.