General President
Jack O’Connor has been General President of SIPTU since 2003, having been re-elected in 2006 for a second term.
He is also President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) since July of 2009 and served previously as Vice President from mid-2007. He has been a member of the Executive Council of Congress since 2001.
Since he became President of SIPTU the Union has been completely restructured along Divisional lines, shifting considerable resources into Organising. His declared priorities are combating worker exploitation, promoting people’s right to participate in collective bargaining and asserting the economic, as well as the moral, superiority of the social democratic approach to which Fairness at Work and Justice in Society are central.
O’Connor has never served on any State Board and has always made it clear that he will never do so because he believes it serves to compromise the image of the Union as an independent workers’ organisation.
He participated on the ICTU negotiating team for social partnership negotiations from 2002 until 2009 when the process collapsed because the Government and employers reneged on their commitments. He supported the “Croke Park Agreement” on public service pay and reform. He argued that it represented the best medium-term strategy in unprecedented times and that it offered the best prospect of serving the interests of both citizens and employees against those seeking wholesale privatisation for profit from public service provision.
Identifying strongly with the Congress “Better Fairer Way Campaign”, he opposes the Government’s deflationary strategy, which he believes is destroying jobs and aggravating economic difficulties. Together with David Begg, General Secretary of Congress and it’s Executive Council, he is seeking to persuade Government to focus on investment in the domestic economy, promoting job creation in order to arrest the decline and bring about a resurgence of sustainable growth.
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