Low and middle income workers who are members of trade union would have been horrified as the salaries of many senior trade union leaders were publicised in the past week.

Workers struggling to make ends meet on anything from a yearly income of €20,000 up to the €38,000 or so before tax, that is the average industrial wage, will wonder how those on €120,000 a year can feel their pain, let alone trade union leaders said to be on more than €170,000 a year. People attempting to survive on unemployment benefit will look even more askance at these figures.

The massive income gap that now exists between most workers, including trade union members, and the top leadership of the unions has been developing for many years. It is an inevitable outcome of so called social partnership – the idea that the Government, big business and workers are on the same level playing pitch, sharing the same concerns and need therefore to work together as ‘partners’.

Of course the very idea was a fraud from the beginning but that was shown with a vengeance during the years of massive increases in house prices. The developers and big construction bosses crucified their ‘social partners’ who were young workers in their twenties and thirties. In a most anti social way they shackled them to savage mortgages for the rest of their working lives. Meanwhile the third ‘partner’ – the Government – aided and abetted this robbery.

Despite this, most of the trade union leaders who were administering the ‘partnership’persisted with the fiction. They had gone soft since the formalisation of the concept in 1987. They took the partnership propaganda seriously even as big business and the Government made a mockery of it. They saw themselves as administrators of this three way deal and, of course, that meant also achieving salaries approximating those of the representatives of big business and Government Ministers with whom they regularly rubbed shoulders.

How different this is to the origins of trade unionism. Workers came together to defend themselves from exploitative employers, to fight for a living wage, for a shorter working week and for recognition of the dignity of being a waged or salaried worker.

This was a movement. Men and women who are individually unknown to us today made heroic sacrifices to build this movement. Many paid with their lives, others were victimised for a lifetime by a vengeful employer class. And it was primarily from the struggles of that movement that basic rights were won by workers, not from the kindness of employers nor from humanitarianism of legislators.

The partnership idea has existed in one form or another for a long time and has had a profound impact on the shape of what used to be known as the labour movement in a broad political as well as industrial sense.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, for nine out of the twenty years, the Labour Party joined in three coalition governments with Fine Gael, a party representing very big farmers and business. Labour Ministers were largely indistinguishable from those of Fine Gael and worked on the same assumption – to rule on the basis of capitalism and not challenge this system in any way.

Thus in the 1980s faced with a dreadful economic crisis, even if not as deep as the present slump, the Labour/Fine Gael Coalition implemented cruel cuts and lashed on taxes and charges on working people while the super rich of the time hid their wealth offshore. With a General Election looming in 1987, Labour limped out of government in protest at new, ‘unjust’ cuts proposed by their erstwhile partners but fooled no one.

Despite much pressure from its rank and file one issue the Labour leadership signally failed to advance in these coalitions was to bring in legislation to stop speculation in building land as recommended by High Court Judge Kenny in 1972. That failure now looms large in the form of the economic crisis worsened enormously in this country by that very speculation.

But back to the present. Faced with savage assaults on their living standards and public services, to pay for a crisis not of their making, workers must reclaim their unions from those who turned them into mere administrative bodies for ‘social partnership’ and still haven’t reconciled themselves with the reality that they have been booted out in the cold now that their usefulness has passed.

The trade unions need to be a movement again, renewed with the spirit of those who founded them. This means active and democratic structures with leaders who live the lifestyle of most workers which is to say on the average industrial wage or, at least on the wage equivalent to an average skilled worker. Leaders who see themselves as fighters for their class rather than arbitrators between workers and capitalism.

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