Trade Union Responses to zero hours work in Ireland

• Author: Jonathan Lavelle,Juliet MacMahon,Caroline Murphy,Patrick Gunnigle,Thomas Turner,Mike O'Brien,Michelle O'Sullivan,Lorraine Ryan
• Published date: 01 November 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irj.12271
• Date: 01 November 2019

Trade Union Responses to zero hours work

in Ireland

Caroline Murphy, Thomas Turner,

Michelle O’Sullivan, Juliet MacMahon,

Jonathan Lavelle, Lorraine Ryan,

Patrick Gunnigle and Mike O’Brien

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the strategies adopted by Irish unions in responding to zero hours

work in four sectors. It concludes that rather than adopting either a passive or a uni-

form approach, unions have pragmatically varied their strategies to curtail zero-

hours work through actively combining both bargaining and regulatory approaches.

1 INTRODUCTION

Both scholars and policymakers have drawn attention to the role that the financial cri-

sis and subsequent economic austerity have played in intensifying the growth of non-

standard and precarious work (ILO, 2011; Ghosh, 2013; McCann, 2014). Terms such

as casualisation and informalisation are used to describe working arrangements that

vary significantly from standard, secure predictable employment, and research indi-

cates that non-standard employment is more likely to be precarious (Kalleberg,

2009; Arnold and Bongiovi, 2013; Burgess et al., 2013). The ILO (2016) contends that

non-standard employment is now a contemporary feature of labour markets globally.

Common forms include temporary employment (fixed-term contracts, seasonal/casual

work, part-time and zero hours/on-call work), multiparty employment relationships

(temporary agency work and subcontracted labour) and dependent self-employment.

While the ILO (2016) acknowledges that for some individuals, non-standard employ-

ment is an explicit choice, for most workers, such employment is associated with inse-

curity. To protect their members, trade unions typically seek to minimise

encroachment on the standard employment relationship (SER). However, given the

multiple forms non-standard work can take, unions face significant challenges in

attempting to curtail employers’actions towards the achievement of increasingly flex-

ible labour markets. It has been argued that unions have been historically ‘ill-prepared’

and sometimes ‘ambivalent’to vulnerable workers (Burgess et al., 2013: 4087).

❒Dr Caroline Murphy is a Lecturer in Employment Relations, Prof Thomas Turner is a Professor of

Industrial Relations, Dr Michelle O’Sullivan is a Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations, Dr Juliet

MacMahon is a Lecturer in Industrial Relations and HRM, Dr Jonathan Lavelle is a Senior Lecturer in

Industrial Relations, Dr Lorraine Ryan is a Lecturer in Employment Relations, Prof Patrick Gunnigle is

a Professor of Business Studies and Mike O’Brien is a Lecturer in Management Development.

Correspondence should be addressed to: Caroline Murphy, Lecturer in Employment Relations, Kemmy

Business School, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland; email: caroline.murphy@ul.ie

Industrial Relations Journal

ISSN 0019-8692

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

50:5

–6, 468

–485

However, research has also pointed unions responding by regulating and representing

non-standard and precarious employment (Campbell, 2010; Gumbrell-McCormick,

2011; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman, 2013). This article examines the responses

of trade unions in Ireland to the growth of zero hours-type work, Ireland is an interest-

ing country to study union responses as research suggests that it has significantly less

regulation of precarious work than many continental countries (Gumbrell-McCor-

mick, 2011). In addition, Irish trade unions were noteworthy for their ‘remarkably

muted’response to government austerity measures during the economic crisis when

compared with the militant mass mobilisation evident in Greece, Portugal and Spain

(Geary, 2016: 143).

There are two types of contracts that involve non-guaranteed hours in Ireland. zero

hours contracts involve non-guaranteed hours and the worker is required to be avail-

able for work. This type of contract is regulated in working time legislation and

workers are entitled to some level of compensation where they do not receive any

work. ‘If and when’contracts also involve non-guaranteed hours but workers are

not required to be available for work. These are not regulated in legislation, and

therefore, workers have no entitlement to compensation if no work is provided. A

third relevant contract is a so-called ‘hybrid if and when’contract whereby workers

get some guaranteed hours but any additional hours are on an ‘if and when’basis,

as desired by the employer.

While unions act to pressurise governments to restrict and regulate precarious type

work at the societal and political level, unions and their members also confront the

emergence and consequences of such working arrangements with more immediacy

at the workplace level. This article seeks to address the following research question:

what has been the trade unions’response to zero hours type work in Ireland? In seek-

ing to address this question, we examine trade union responses at the national level,

through lobbying for legislation, and in four non-tradable sectors: hospitality, retail,

education and health. This cross-sectoral analysis of union responses provides the ba-

sis for a greater understanding of the impact that the broader institutional context and

industrial relations climate in individual sectors has on the strategies unions employ

to regulate non-standard work in increasingly flexible labour markets. Our main re-

search question is to identify the factors that determine whether unions espouse an ac-

tive strategy of collective bargaining at workplace level, a campaign for regulation at

national level or opt for a passive approach in response to zero hours work.

We begin with a review of the extant literature on the causes and consequences of

precarious work more generally and unions’ability to respond to this challenge. We

then focus on the nature of the Irish trade union response to the growth of precarious

work from 2008 onwards (post the onset of the global financial crisis). This is followed

by examples of union responses in the four sectors. The article concludes with a discus-

sion of the rationale for union responses and the extent to which these have the poten-

tial to be effective in curtailing the growth of zero hours work. The paper contributes

to a greater understanding of the impact that the industrial relations climate in individ-

ual sectors has on the strategies unions employ to regulate non-standard work.

2 THE CASUALISATION OF WORK

Kalleberg and Hewison (2013) categorise three macrolevel drivers of precarious work

in industrialised nations: the advance of neoliberalism as a political and economic

agenda, the expansion of global competition and technological development. These

Trade union responses to zero hours work in Ireland 469

© 2019 Brian Towers (BRITOW) and John Wiley & Sons Ltd