Joyce Fegan: What constitutes 'a good job' in Ireland now?

'Tech' places enjoyed a good reputational run for years, but now the glean is gone and it's time to go back to the drawing board

The statue of Jim Larkin, who fought for workers’ rights to unionise. Picture: Maura Hickey

For the last decade or so, a “good job” in Ireland was in a place where there were bean bags, football tables, free lunches, and dinners, and where shirts and ties were frowned upon. For this level of luxury, you were handsomely paid too. And your friends were only dying to get invited in for lunch to the salad bar or for some stone-baked pizza fresh from the wood-fired oven. They’d even take a few smoothies from the fridge on their way out.

But you’d never have pulled the wool over Jim Larkin’s or James Connolly’s eyes, for all the free lunches in Ireland.

Like Graham Norton’s librarian sister’s sage advice on book titles, these places usually had just one-word titles. And at a wedding or a party, strangers would simply be told: “Mary works for Cloud” or “Paul works in Wave”. It didn’t matter what you did there, just that you worked there. Until, perhaps this week, you didn’t.

It all started on Thursday, November 3, when employees at online payments firm Stripe received an email from their CEO, Limerick-born billionaire, Patrick Collison.

“We’re reducing the size of our team by around 14% and saying goodbye to many talented Stripes in the process,” he wrote. The next line “the Stripes” would read was the clincher: “If you’re among those impacted, you will receive a notification email within the next 15 minutes.”

It kind of had a Love Island vibe to it, where the love-seeking tabloid TV contestants awaited a text message about their fate.

On Friday, November 4, it was Twitter’s turn.

News broke that 50% of the social media firm were being sacked (about 3,700 people globally) in a “random and indiscriminate culling”. The news of the job losses came by email too — in what appears to be the new and “trendy” way to conduct business.

Then workers got locked out. No access to email or online working channels for the people whose jobs were gone. And no access to the buildings where the remaining staff still worked. Their badges were suspended too. For a company that apparently culled its entire human rights team, this move was about “safety”.

Next came Meta, parent company to all those apps that are now part of the daily fabric of our lives: Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

Last Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that cuts were coming at the social media firm. On Wednesday morning the people who work at Facebook got an email of their own. There would be more than 11,000 jobs cut, with 350 jobs in Ireland at risk.

Mark Zuckerberg said he was 'accountable' for missteps leading to the job cuts. Picture: Sam Boal/RollingNews.ie

Mark Zuckerberg, the T-shirt-wearing billionaire boy of tech, said he was “accountable” for the company’s missteps that led to these cuts. They were words quite close to those of his fellow billionaire Patrick Collison who said he was “fully responsible for the decisions leading up to” their cuts.

What do the words “accountable” and “responsible” mean? Are they not that affirmative, reparative action is taken, or do they now mean far less than that, just adjectives to insert into digital correspondence that serves up life-changing news?

And then there was another email from a third billionaire, Elon Musk’s first note to Twitter staff as owner, last Wednesday, November 9.

He went old-school and did the poor mouth.

“Frankly, the economic picture ahead is dire,” wrote the beleaguered billionaire, “there is a good chance Twitter will not survive the upcoming economic downturn.”

You’d wonder why he bought the platform in the first place if he feels this pessimistic about it, but then, a fearful population is a malleable one.

“Starting tomorrow (Thursday), everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week,” wrote Musk, thus ending the company’s remote work policy.

More old-school from Musk.

A study by Stanford of 16,000 workers over the course of nine months found that working from home increased productivity by 13%, and that was just one of many such studies.

But why move with the times, when you can live in the stone age and favour forced presentee-ism over productivity?

None of this is really much of a surprise.

In October 2021, the mask slipped slightly when some tech bros exchanged slights about male workers taking paternity leave.

A public official was branded a “loser” by a venture capitalist for taking paternity leave. The leave related to the care of newborn twins. Most people are brought to their knees by the arrival of one baby with round-the-clock feeds, constant changes, suspected silent reflux and what not. Imagine doubling that. The discourse was a glimpse into the actual culture of Silicon Valley, not just the PR-spun gloss on top of it.

For a generation of workers, these were the “good jobs”. Good meant exciting decor, free food, an informal atmosphere, and jeans instead of pencil skirts or suit trousers.

It was the direct opposite of their parents’ “boring jobs”. Boring meant the permanent, pensionable position, the “job for life”, where walking out the door at 5pm meant an honest day’s work, not a half day.

Back in the day the “job for life” or the “permanent pensionable position” was the good job.

The ethos of 70-hour weeks has not been a positive one.

Over time this morphed into people voluntarily working 70-hour weeks in the name of #LoveWhereYouWork and sitting down to work after you’d put the kids to bed. There were no rumblings of workers’ rights, collective bargaining, or joining a union.

Larkin and Connolly would have something to say about those hours, considering they were the men who led the 1913 lock-out, a labour conflict based on workers not being allowed to unionise.

Those workers, almost 100 years ago, lived in a Dublin of zero-hour contracts, where a third of the capital lived in the tenement slums and where 142 in 1,000 infants died — the highest for a European city.

From lockouts and slums for one generation to union members with jobs for life for subsequent ones, the might of collective bargaining is a life-changing one for many.

Where are we now?

Is a “good job” really a 70-hour work week where you’re only uncontactable when asleep, but there’s an aluminium slide in the office? Or is a good job one where you’ve got a decent pension and being sick with the flu for a day isn’t considered dossing?

These “tech” places, whereas in reality they’re mostly media companies reliant on ad revenue, enjoyed a good reputational run for years, but now the glean is gone.

Now it’s time to return to the drawing board and consider what actually makes a job a “good job” in 2022? Safety comes to mind.