Sarah Harte: Young people are very pro-union — so why aren’t they joining any?

‘Nomadland’ showed how seasonal
workers are treated like fodder in
cavernous Amazon warehouses. Picture: PA

Yesterday, the British Conservative Party signalled its intention to curb the right to strike by way of legislation. It will face an uphill battle legally, but it’s another landmark in what’s best described as a difficult labour market.

Tech in particular is having a rough ride globally. Last week, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar reportedly told political journalists that a “slightly more positive picture” had emerged around the tech sector in the aftermath of layoffs and temporary furloughing of workers last autumn.

However, two days later, Salesforce Ireland announced plans to cut 10% of its global workforce, and Amazon said it is to cut 18,000 jobs.

Two weeks ago, it was reported that Google employees in Switzerland had sought confirmation from management that a new employee evaluation system would not lead to a back-door cull of workers.

In a souring global economy, tech workers — many of whom are young — are left interpreting company statements around cost-cutting and reorganisation to figure out if their jobs are on the line.

Recent layoffs in Meta (Facebook), Intel, Stripe, and Wayflyer made the headlines, but it was Twitter that really drew attention for its brutal laying-off of roughly half its workforce, with many only finding out that they had been let go when they were locked out of the company’s intranet.

A practice seems to have sprung up where employees are required to eye their screens to see if their names have disappeared from email chains, in which case they’re what Irish Zoomers (Gen Z) call ‘toast’. It brings the word ‘unions’ to mind.

In Ireland, you have a constitutional right to join a union, but there is no legal obligation on an employer to recognise or deal with a trade union for the purposes of negotiations on pay and work conditions.

Legislative protection (largely informed by EU law) and the Constitution give employees rights in the areas of dismissals and redundancies, including the right to fair procedures in accordance with natural justice.

A cynic might interpret that to mean that, in real terms, you don’t actually have a right to be in a union, but rather a right to have your dismissal scrutinised.

Naturally, companies have a right to rationalise and to realign priorities, and this may be a necessity in a bumpy economic environment. Employees don’t have a right to a job. But we live in an increasingly, grossly, unequal world, a fact not lost on Millennials and Gen Z.

It makes you wonder if at some point our socially engaged, ‘left-leaning’ youth may turn their attention from climate change, race, and housing to their economic rights. Their disaffection is the wave Sinn Féin hopes to ride in the next election.

According to the 2021 UCD Working in Ireland Survey, young Irish people are the cohort most well-disposed to the idea of union representation, although their level of representation remains lowest at 15% for 25- to 34-year-olds, whereas this rises to 45% for the 55-64 cohort.

Why does this openness not translate into holding a union card or realising the value of collective bargaining?

According to John Geary, co-author of the UCD study with Maria Belizón, there are several reasons why a gap remains between young workers’ stated openness to joining unions and their low union membership.

Young people, he says, must first encounter unions to know them.

In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in Ireland, the chances are that up to 70% of parents (meaning mostly fathers) would have worked in unionised jobs, with workers’ rights being discussed at home, so unions would have been a familiar concept.

Today’s young people may be politically awake, but without being educated at school about their economic rights, the concepts of unions and employment rights remain hazy.

He also points out that “having rights is one thing, but being able to exercise them is quite another”. As he says: “It’s hard to join a union that doesn’t exist.”

Forming a union may be a difficult thing to do “where the signals from the employer are hostile”. In non-union sectors, such as tech, you’d have to be either brave or foolhardy, depending on your perspective, to put your hand up.

Trade union membership has fallen dramatically throughout most EU member states. Ireland is no exception, with the rate of workers represented by a trade union having fallen from over 60% in the early 80s to 25% now.

Last December, the European Observatory of Working Life attributed this pattern of falling union membership to what they euphemistically described as the proliferation of “non-standard forms of employment” as well as the decline of the industrial sectors.

They mean workers in precarious jobs with low wages who almost certainly have a fear of raising employment concerns.

Young tech workers are often on good salaries, which may feed into their view of how they are represented, meaning they don’t perceive themselves as needing unions (assuming they even know what they are).

If they are disgruntled, they can talk to a line manager (there are virtually no unions in tech) or they can leave. If they leave voluntarily or are let go, they can find another job so long as the music doesn’t stop. And while some young workers are forced to bounce from precarious job to precarious job, others move because, culturally, that’s what they’re attuned to do.

Prof Geary makes the point that unions may need to reorient themselves if they are to direct their attention to younger workers who are not paid-up members of unions. They will need to devise new means of allowing young workers to participate in identifying their concerns and taking ownership of their rights.

Currently, many unions mobilise around “job-centric representation”; that is, unions focus on representing workers in a specific job in a specific organisation.

“It may be necessary”, he says, “for unions to develop a model of representation that spans a person’s life, so that representation moves with a worker when they leave a job.”

It was once felt that the pendulum had swung too far in favour of employee rights and overly strong unions were deleterious to business. We can safely say that the creation of a class of tech and finance plutocrats has meant that the pendulum has swung much too far the other way.

The Oscar-winning film Nomadland gives a glimpse of the heart of darkness in the cavernous Amazon warehouses where seasonal workers are treated like fodder. The good news is that a fightback is already in train by Amazon and Starbucks workers against their monolithic anti-union employers.

In the headwinds of global layoffs, it will be interesting to see if younger generations stick it to the man by getting organised. The smaller the stake people have in society, the more radicalised they may become. The way things are going, do not underestimate them.