Contrasts and Contradictions in Union Organising: The Irish Mushroom Industry

This chapter describes the recent efforts of SIPTU, the largest union in Eire with 225,000 members, to eradicate underpayment and mistreatment of migrant agricultural workers in the Irish mushroom industry through an ‘organising’ approach between 2006 and 2007. SIPTU used a top-down, bureaucratic approach to improve mushroom workers’ standards and organise these workers. SIPTU tried to implement an ‘organising’ model of labour unionism by using an apparatus trained to ‘service’ existing union members while concomitantly negotiating at a high level with employers and the state in the context of national social partnership (see Allen, this volume). Accordingly, SIPTU’s campaign in the mushroom sector managed to increase the rate of employer compliance with legal labour standards by lobbying state agencies rather than by deploying workforce pressure at workplace level. This achievement, however, fell short of the mark that SIPTU set itself when it launched its campaign to ‘clean up’ the mushroom industry. This chapter argues that a participative, militant grassroots dynamic within unions is a necessary condition to implement a proper ‘organising’ model.