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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
38June 2015
T
HE ongoing Dunnes Stores
dispute is a potentially critical
battle against low-wage, inse-
cure employment in Ireland.
June th’s march to the com-
pany headquarters was a continuation
of a battle begun on April nd, when
, workers in the retailer went on
strike, led by their union Mandate. That
strike itself came after a year’s work by
the union, which established the
Decency for Dunnes Workers campaign
on foot of workers’ unhappiness with
the nature of their contracts.
The campaign has four demands -
decent hours, fair pay, job security and
recognition of their union. The first of
these has become the cause célèbre of
the campaign, with Dunnes workers’
flexi-hour contracts drawing compari-
son with similar, but slightly worse,
zero-hour contracts in Britain.
These flexi-hour contracts leave
many Dunnes workers on a guarantee of
only fifteen hours per week. Even
though they often get many more than
this, the limited guarantee on hours is
used by management as a means of con-
trol, to disincentivise dissent or manage
workers who they want to get rid of out
of employment.
But for many others flexi-hours also
mean a state of permanent underem-
ployment. Hours can also be spread out
over an entire week, meaning the capac-
ity to top up wages with welfare
payments is severely limited. The
family income supplement, requiring a
minimum of nineteen hours per week
for eligibility, is also out of reach. This
gives the company the power to reduce
a worker’s earnings from € to €
at a stroke of a pen.
There has been significant public
sympathy for the Dunnes campaign, on
this issue in particular. And, when you
explore the numbers, it’s easy to see
why. At the beginning of the economic
crisis less than one percent of Ireland’s
workers classified themselves as under-
employed. Today, according to
Eurostat, it’s almost eight times that.
Dunnes
beats
them all
The war for employment
security starts here.
By Ronan Burtenshaw
POLITICS Dunnes Stores
June 2015 39
That makes around , people.
But that isn’t the only area where the
campaign chimes with the experience
of post-crash Ireland. One of Mandate’s
other demands, recently ceded by
Dunnes, though it denies it was related
to the strike, was for a % pay rise for
the workers.
By making their workforce increas-
ingly precarious, Dunnes has joined the
army of low-paying employers in Ire-
land. The extent of these problems is
evident in the most recent OECD data,
which placed Ireland second in the
developed world for low-paying jobs.
Between a fifth and a quarter of all
those working in Ireland fail to make
two-thirds of the country’s median
wage.
Given that our median wage is a
measly €, per year, this means
Ireland has a huge number of people
who are working poor.
We also have , part-time
workers, a third of whom are involun-
tarily so. According to Mandate, “there
is widespread use of fixed-term and
temporary contracts within Dunnes
Stores. In many instances, workers ini-
tially get -month contracts, followed
by -month contracts. Many are then
let go without explanation and replaced
by others on similar short-term con-
tracts. Consequently the available hours
are being deliberately directed away
from established members of staff”.
The workers’ demands are for perma-
nent contracts with ‘standard’
probation periods. These, when com-
bined with the banded-hour contracts
and pay increases the strike also fought
for, would begin to sound like the kind
of jobs people could make a living on.
In April, at the picket line on North
Earl Street, I spoke to three women
workers from Dunnes. For two of them,
both from Santry in Dublin’s northside,
the biggest issue with their precarious
status was the inability to get credit.
“Banks won’t lend if you’re on these
hours”, Faye said, “so you can’t get a
house, or a car, or even other loans
easily. It’s just like a ceiling you’re living
with”.
For the other, who didn’t want to be
identifiable, the issue was recognition.
Not being willing to even meet with the
union feels like a snub. But it goes far
beyond this: it is about recognition of
the contribution the workers made to
the company. She felt that the compa-
ny’s management saw them as “pawns”
and hoped that its attitude would
change after a strike.
Those who were hoping for that out-
come were to be bitterly disappointed,
however. The day after the strike on
Holy Thursday, Dunnes’ management
across the country began calling in
workers who were on the picket lines to
meetings. In these, many had their
hours reduced, were moved to parts of
stores they had never worked in before,
or were told their contracts wouldn’t be
renewed.
Others, like Karina McGovern, who
worked in Dunnes in Northside Shop-
ping Centre, were in effect sacked. A
worker in the store for six months, she
says she was told at a recent appraisal
that she was “a permanent member of
staff”, but never signed any document
to this end.
After taking part in the strike on
April nd, “because she couldn’t feel
any security on the contract she had”,
she was called up to her manager’s office
the next day at :pm. She wasn’t
asked to bring a witness and none was
present.
At the meeting she was told that she
would be let go. “Shocked,” she
enquired after a reason. Her manager
told her simply, “we can’t give you one”.
Devastated by the news of her job
loss, McGovern was then told to return
to the tills to work out her shift. Her
colleagues in the Coolock store,
incensed by this, rang their union to tell
them. Morale in the store has been at an
all-time low ever since.
“The most difficult thing,” McGovern
said, “is seeing them hire five new
people so soon afterwards. That job was
how I lived and then it was gone, no
reason given. I was made an example of
and replaced. That tells all you need to
know about how it is for us and why
there was a strike”.
Tony Malone from Dundalk was a
victim of similar treatment. The day
after the strike, two days shy of a year
in his job, with an excellent appraisal in
his pocket, he was told he would not be
getting a new contract. When he asked
why, having never been given any indi-
cation that this outcome was likely, he
was met with a wall of silence. Again,
management said there was no reason
that could be offered.
Malone says he feels “angry” at how
he was treated. “I do feel angry, I think
anyone would in that situation. It was
obvious what they were doing.” But this
hasn’t stopped him from participating
in the protests outside the store in Dun-
dalk where he was sacked two months
ago. “The issues we did the strike over
are still relevant”.
The continuing relevance of the
workers’ concerns about their precari-
ous positions was seen more recently in
Gorey, County Wexford. The local
Dunnes Stores branch, seeking more
customers, opened its side door to steer
foot traffic directly into the shop rather
than having it go through the shopping
centre. Grant McCann, the receivers in
charge of the shopping centre, took out
an injunction against this, citing previ-
ous agreements against it.
Unhappy with the injunction Dunnes
decided to play high-stakes poker with
the shopping centre and announced
that it would be shutting the shop, with
the loss of one-hundred jobs. By the end
of May an agreement was reached to
grant a stay in the injunction for two
months, leaving the side door open.
Dunnes had won but in the process had
thrown the lives of a lot of their employ-
ees into chaos.
McGovern says the Gorey situation
also had an effect on other Dunnes
Stores. “I know other workers looked at
that and thought, ‘we could be next’. It’s
so easy for them to do it, just let all
those people go, over something small.
Why wouldn’t they do it to us for a
strike?”
While April nd’s strike was widely
seen as a success in the trade union
movement, affecting Dunnes Stores’
profits and attracting significant public
support, Mandate is aware that any
further action will require a significant
morale boost after Dunnes’ retaliation
of recent weeks.
This was the thinking behind the June
th protest march, an unusual – though
not unprecedented – tactic for a labour
dispute. Locked-out Greyhound work-
ers did something similar a year ago.
This may show the Dunnes workers
that there is solidarity with their cause
from a broad cross-section of society, as
well as from the trade-union movement
itself. “The cause is much bigger than
just Dunnes”, Mandate Communication
Officer Dave Gibney tells me, “and the
workers need to see that. They need to
know they aren’t going to fight all this
without support.”
It would be hard to overstate the
importance of the strike to the trade-
union movement in Ireland. Across the
OECD data
place Ireland
second in the
developed
world for low-
paying jobs. A
quarter of all
those working
in Ireland fail
to make two-
thirds of the
median wage
“
40June 2015
They now have about % market
share, with Dunnes in the middle and
retailers like Tesco, Argos, Penneys,
and Marks and Spencer, which do have
agreements with Mandate, offering
better terms and conditions on the
other side. If the Dunnes dispute is lost
the risk is that the sector becomes Aldi-
fied, with all of these deciding to
compete by undermining workers’ con-
ditions and freezing out the union.
Gibney feels the message needs to get
out that this strike is about the ability of
the retail sector to provide people with
a livelihood. “What we need the public
to understand is that this is about
decent work across the board. When
disputes are won, and when they are
lost, there are knock-on effects. Today
it’s Dunnes workers on these flexi-hour
contracts, but they are growing rapidly.
Who’s to say tomorrow it won’t be you,
or your son or daughter?”.
He doesn’t rule out further industrial
action, either. “We are in this fight for
our members for the long haul. The
terms and conditions in Dunnes are
going to have to improve.
This is a company with estimated
profits of €m annually in the
Republic. The Dunnes family have four
slots in the top forty in Ireland’s rich
list, with assets worth over €bn. They
can’t [morally] have people working for
them who can’t plan their lives, get a
house, or save a few quid”.
As we hit summer it appears that the
stage is set for another strike. The
stakes are high for the future of the
Irish economy. And society.
Is the recovery going to bring stable
living conditions for a majority of
people in Ireland? Or is the decline in
unemployment going to be soaked up by
low-wage, insecure jobs?
The old slogan for Dunnes was
“Dunnes Stores beats them all”. The
first clue as to the post-recession future
for work in Ireland will be whether
Dunnes beat its workers. •
developed world precarious labour is
becoming a dominant feature of twen-
ty-first century capitalism. People are
on shorter hours, shorter contracts and
working for less pay. This is even more
of a problem in the small, open-econ-
omy model pursued by successive Irish
governments, which creates very few
sustainable, middle-income jobs.
The Labour Party in government has
pledged to address this but, as in so
many other areas, it has come up short.
Minister Ged Nash has commissioned
an investigation into low-hour con-
tracts to be conducted by the University
of Limerick, but its terms of reference
means it will probably be irrelevant.
Only workers on jobs guaranteeing
eight hours or less per week will be
included - omitting from the research
the , in Dunnes engaged in an
actual dispute on the issue.
It is also unclear what effect the pro-
posed collective-bargaining legislation
will have on Dunnes workers’ situation.
Technically what is proposed, and sup-
ported by the Irish Congress of Trade
Unions, is not collective bargaining but
a means to have Labour Court recom-
mendations enforced by the Circuit
Court.
Many within the trade union move-
ment argue that this is the best that can
be achieved, given the constitutional
restraints, but it would still leave Ire-
land as one of the few countries in
Europe without a right to trade union
recognition.
Its limitations can be seen best in the
case of Dunnes. If the circuit court were
to vindicate the right of Dunnes work-
ers to banded-hours contracts, but the
company were still not involved in
direct negotiation with the union, how
would these banded hours be negoti-
ated? In response to the strike, for a
temporary period, Dunnes recently
installed four-week rosters for many of
its staff, dealing with one complaint
about precarity. But without regular
negotiation with a representative
organisation, how can workers tell if
these measures will be kept in place?
Another reason that the union move-
ment would do well not to lose this
dispute is the growth of militantly anti-
union Aldi and Lidl in the sector. In
many cases offering even worse terms
of employment, these stores have very
little union density, and notorious repu-
tations for treating workers poorly in
other countries.
Devastated
by the news
of her job
loss with
no reason,
McGovern was
then told to
return to the
tills to work
out her shift
“
POLITICS Dunnes Stores
Tony Malone
