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Centenary Celebrations

Fight for union recognition an unfinished part of Larkin legacy

Date Released: 30 Jan 2009

Trade union leaders “are engaged in very tough negotiations to ensure the gains made in recent agreements on workplace rights are not eroded by the current employers’ offensive”, SIPTU General Secretary Joe O’Flynn said today. “The most crucial of these gains is a commitment from the Government to outlaw discrimination against trade union activists in the workplace.”

Mr. O’Flynn was speaking at a special ceremony in O’Connell Street to mark the death of Labour leader Jim Larkin. It is one of a number of events to mark the centenary of SIPTU’s origins. He added that legislation to outlaw discrimination in the national agreement “is very much to be welcomed, but until we also secure the right to workplace representation for all who desire it, we will not have delivered on the most fundamental principle in Larkin’s legacy. Only then will the Irish labour movement begin to realise the enormous potential that he recognised when he came to this city a century ago and dedicated himself to the emancipation of the Irish working class.

At present, “the right to organise and be represented by a trade union when times are tough is denied to tens of thousands of workers. A hundred years after Jim Larkin founded our Union and 98 years after workers were batoned off this very street for demanding the right to trade union recognition we are still fighting for it. An African-American can be elected president of the United States but a worker in this country, no matter what his colour or nationality, is still denied the basic civil right to freedom of association and representation in the place where he works to negotiate on the pay and conditions that he, or she, and their family depend upon”, Mr. O’Flynn said.

“A hundred years ago this month Jim Larkin founded the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, forerunner to SIPTU. Today also marks the 63rd anniversary of his death. While tens of thousands of trade union activists in the decades since have come together to champion the rights of labour and ordinary working people, it was Jim Larkin whose vision gave them the means to do so.

“He continued to spread his gospel of ‘divine discontent’ to Dublin, Cork, Wexford, Sligo and other centres. By 1913 unskilled workers had not alone joined the ranks of the trade union movement alongside craft workers but had assumed its leadership, fighting for women’s rights and national independence as well as a living wage.”

While Ireland had changed utterly since Larkin’s day, many of the problems remained, including lack of affordable housing and health care.  The immediate task the trade union movement faced was to prevent some employers from tearing up agreements and trying to make ordinary working people pay for their mistakes. Young couples were having to “dig deep to try and escape the poverty trap of negative equity from their own resources, while the banks are bailed out with taxpayers’ money.”





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