Occupation as resistance: The case of worker sit-ins in the Irish Republic

Replicating global trends, the Irish Republic has been mired in a deepening fiscal and economic crisis since 2008. At workplace level there has been a steady increase in cash-strapped firms forced to restructure and/or close operations. Consequently, a number of employers have imposed redundancy, often without negotiation, and based on minimum statutory entitlements. In reply, worker mobilization has increased in both a scale and form not seen in the Irish Republic for some decades. Specifically, small numbers of employees have responded through the deployment of direct action with sit-ins and mass occupations of company premises. This paper outlines the context, form and trajectory of worker occupations as a tactical response to organizational restructuring and financial crisis management using a case study of three Irish occupations in 2009. The analysis will examine the antecedent influences and factors surrounding the phenomenon of worker sit-ins as well as points of comparison and difference in respective cases. Finally, examining disputes where sit-ins have been deployed, the paper seeks to evaluate its capacity for securing workers’ concerns in countering the threat of redundancy. Introduction Since 2008, the Irish Republic has fallen victim to a serious economic malaise. An over-heated economy, driven by a construction and property boom, effectively collapsed. The construction sector, the backbone of the economy for near a decade and accounting for close to 25% of national GDP, suffered a reversal in fortunes as banks were unable to lend and house prices fell. The knock-on effect was unemployment and falling consumer spending. Financial institutions teetered on the verge of collapse as money tied up in bad debts to the property industry was lost. Government finances hemorrhaged as tax receipts from the construction industry collapsed. Added to this was a wider recession in global demand. Irish exports, an important plank of economic growth, progressively weakened, a process exacerbated by a strong Euro and falling growth in US, UK and the Euro-zone. In sum, these developments brought an end to a 15 yearlong era of hitherto unseen economic growth in the Republic (Honohan, 2009). In the industrial relations sphere, the resulting recession sparked a wave of redundancies and firm closures across both foreign and indigenous-owned firms throughout a broad range of sectors. Figures suggest that in 2009, the number of redundancies was at 77,001, an increase of 89.6% over the total in 2008, which itself had been a 59.5% increase on 2007 (Central Statistics Office, 2010). One feature of the trend in redundancies has been the tendency for employers to display hard-line and uncompromising responses (Higgins, 2010). In a number of cases, employers have rejected Labour Court recommendations on severance issues or offered significantly lower terms than in the past or indeed statutory entitlements only. Although the full picture of worker and trade union responses to employer actions remains uncertain, and no comprehensive data sets exist upon which to draw more generalizable conclusions, indicative patterns are evident. Whilst there is evidence of employee passivity and resignation to redundancy, Irish unions have increasingly challenged employers, not so much on the fact of redundancy itself, but rather on attempting to secure the best possible for members in the form of severance pay and supportive measures. Thus unions have sought recourse to the national Labour Court for recommendations and increases in ex-gratia settlements already offered by employers or some level of enhanced ex-gratia severance payment on top of statutory entitlements (Higgins, 2010). Furthermore, there has been increasing use of strike action (Farrelly, 2010). Within this context of resistance to redundancy and firm closure, is a noteworthy minority response of an unusual and somewhat dramatic character. This is the use of sit-ins and workplace occupations as an employee tactic to influence employer behaviour on the use of redundancy. This tactic is of long historical vintage, albeit infrequently used. In Ireland there have been several high-profile instances of worker occupations since 2008 occurring in instances where the near total redundancy of the workforce has been proposed by the employer or where the employer has sought to execute redundancy and workplace closure with immediate effect; often with little or no consultation with those affected. This paper explores the dynamic of worker occupations as have occurred in the Irish Republic in recent years. It asks what are the factors giving rise to such responses and how effective are they in securing workers’ objectives. The paper utilizes a detailed case-study of three instances where occupations have been deployed, examining the influences, form and trajectory of such occupations. The paper contributes to re-emerging interest in the phenomena of worker occupation and to knowledge and understanding on why workers might deploy this tactic when face with situations of redundancy and workplace closure (Gall 2010). The paper begins however by tracing some of the core conceptual considerations for industrial relations scholars around analyzing worker occupations, raising a number of pertinent questions. It then outlines the methodology and case study settings. Following from this are the main descriptive findings. The paper concludes with further analysis and discussion. Conceptualizing Occupations Sit-ins and factory occupations have a long vintage as tactics of worker resistance in industrial relations. In Italy, after the First World War, a wave of factory occupations in Turin became the centre of what was known as the “two red years” (Franzosi, 1995). Work occupations played a key role in the spread of unionisation across the motor industry in the United States throughout the 1930s (Skocpol et al. 1990), whilst the dramatic Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupation of 1971–1972 in Scotland not only prevented the yards' closure and secured jobs, but was the forerunner for a subsequent wave of sit-ins across Britain throughout 1970s and early 1980s (Dickson and Judge 1987; Coates, 1981). Commentary however on workplace sit-ins in large measure tends to veer between those who simply dismiss them as a temporary phenomena based on ill-conceived notions of economic necessity (Bruno and Sachs, 1985) and those who contend that they offer serious contributions to worker control and industrial democracy (Sherry, 2010). Whatever the merits of these respective readings, sit-ins can be more plainly understood as a special form of strike action, of which the implications are no more or less economically ill-founded or revolutionary than conventional strikes. As such, conceptually the phenomena of worker occupations can be considered under the sponsorship of bargaining theory. A prominent aspect of this theoretical genre, at least under zero-sum frameworks, is to view bargaining as a means by which each party can enhance its own interests by inflicting, or threatening to inflict, losses on the other party to the negotiation (Pen, 1959; Cramton and Tracey, 1992). Under the auspices of classic wage negotiations for example, a settlement is likely to be reached at the point where the union considers that the potential gains of declining to accept what is on offer, and pressing for more, fail to offset the estimated costs of strike action. Equally, employers will wish to calculate the point at which agreeing to increased wages is less costly than the alternative prospect of risking a strike. Bargaining is conducted within a zone whose parameters consist of an upper limit beyond which employers will prefer strike or shutdown than to agree to higher increases and a lower limit below which the union will opt for strike action rather than agreement (Crouch, 1981). A core assumption is that of a continuing relationship between the parties, which invariably allows for the expectancy that a settlement will at some point be secured within the perimeter of the contract zone (Flanders, 1970). What each party needs to consider is how short-run losses compare with the possible longer-run gains of undertaking an attempt at coercion. The excepted future gains in turn will depend on each party’s assessment of the other side’s likely short-run loss and willingness to settle. Applying such frameworks to redundancy scenarios, wherein worker occupations most typically occur, requires a degree of adjustment, particularly so when the threatened redundancies are ‘across-the-board’ as in the instance of a factory shut-down. An ongoing bargaining relationship cannot serve as working assumption, given that the future existence of the relationship itself is uncertain (Redman and Wilkinson, 2006). The threat of strike action in such a context is inexorably a weak one, for if workers stop work at a site which the employer seeks to wind down, than far from imposing any loss on the employer, workers will be granting the employers preferences. In practice, the position may be more convoluted; for example, where a firm seeks to accomplish a measured rundown of production before complete closure or where the proposed closure or redundancies are only a particular fraction of the extant workforce. Under this scenario, a strike or other form of industrial action may rigorously obstruct management intentions. The threat of a strike for employers consists in the temporary loss of profits on work which would otherwise have been completed. Its enormity will depend on a variety of factors but particularly on the ease with which the product of such work can be sold. Where there is little demand for the company’s product or where it cannot be sold profitably, the threat of strike action tends to become shallow. A sit-in, on the other hand, may represent a more direct form of economic sanction. As Gall (2010: 110) has observed: “In a situation of closure