General President
Jack O’Connor has served as the General President of SIPTU, Ireland’s largest trade union, since 2003 and was re-elected unopposed in 2006.
He has been a member of the Executive Council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions since 2001 and was elected as Vice President of Congress in 2007. He also serves on both the General Purposes Committee and the Private Sector Committee of the ICTU. He participated on the ICTU Negotiating Team for the Sustaining Progress and Towards 2016 Agreements. His declared priorities are combating worker exploitation, promoting people’s right to participate in collective bargaining, advancing the training and skills agenda and asserting the economic, as well as the moral superiority, of Fairness at Work and Justice in Society.
Born in 1957, Jack O’Connor is a native of North County Dublin. Employed in the agriculture, construction and local authority sectors, he was a trade union activist before becoming a full-time Branch Secretary of the former Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland in 1980 - organising fire fighters, port workers and public sector and local authority employees.
On the formation of SIPTU in January 1990, he was appointed Regional Secretary in the Midlands and in 1997 he took on the additional responsibility for the Union’s South-East Region. In contrast to his earlier trade union experience, the workers he represented during this phase of his union involvement were predominantly in the private sector. He was elected as SIPTU’s Vice President in 2000.
A long-standing member of the Labour Party, he is a member of its Executive Committee.
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