BIG Jim Larkin left an indelible mark on the psyche of Irish workers. He managed to instil a spirit of defiance and self worth in those for whom such qualities had always been in short supply.
He brought the message of solidar, and struggle to the workers, inspiring a new confidence among the ranks of the dispossessed. For this alone he stands as a permanent symbol to the Irish trade union movement of the power of organisation.
Larkin's trade union campaigning bad a lot in common with the great industrial movements of the early years of this century in Britain, the United States, Russia and central Europe, where, armed with a new credo of socialism, Bolshevism and militant syndicalism, labour leaders began to challenge the older and more conservative craft unions as well as the exploitation of the employers.
He forged mighty weapons for Irish workers, North and South, with the sympathetic strike, the boycott of goods" - Larkin's term for the produce of scab labour - the mass meeting, and, above all, the policy of combining political and industrial action. These were a clear departure from weapons of war traditionally associated with the national struggle, or with the earlier secret societies endemic in the Irish resistance to oppression.
The lessons were well learned by the fledgling trade union movement and applied frequently in later years on many occasions by organised workers. Of Larkin's funeral, James Plunkett Kelly, who considered him "the last of the great militants", wrote, "on that bleak day in February 1947, when thousands stood in the slush and the cold to bid him farewell, an era of Titanic struggle moved peacefully to an end."
In truth, it was the end of his form of militancy, but not the end of his inspirational approach to social struggle or trade union organisation.
He left us with strong general unions in both the ITGWU and the FWUI, in our generation renewed as SIPTU. He succeeded in raising the status of unskilled workers to a new level through union organisation but also ensured their voice was heard in the city council, Dail chamber, and everywhere that decisions affecting their lives are taken.
HE bequeathed that sense of vision which allows the modern trade union move omove beyond a defensive pay bargaining agenda to seek a new role for workers in the 21st century workplace. Trade unions now demand not just better pay and improved conditions but equality and a sharing of resources, tax reform, education and training, social protections and, most significantly, the right to be important stakeholders in their own employment, consulted at work in works councils ore boardrooms.
Larkin organised labour and bargained for its price. Our labour movement now bargains about everything which determines the quality of that life. It's a qualitative change, an opening of the seed sown by Larkin and his peers. The modern trade unions movement uses collective intelligence more than collective muscle, but demands recognition of workers as full, intelligent human beings.
But we need to keep Larkin's anger at the misery of degradation with us, because the degradation that he saw around him is still embedded deeply in our society. For thousands of our workers, the new economic orthodoxy of deregulation and labour market flexibility means a return to the hire and tire practices Larkin battled against, the employers' market where everyone is permanently on call and everyone is disposable.
Vast armies of casual workers, competing with each other in a desperate survival struggle, are now the mainstay not only of the hotel and catering industry, the fast food and retail outlets, but the once secure white collar professions teaching, even journalism. Larkin would find it a bitter epitaph that the old dock system of daily casual labour, killed by the hard efforts of previous generations of trade unionists, has come to lffe again in the port of Dublin in the 1990s.
In his time Larkin challenged the destructive impact of alcohol on workers' lives. He took the dead band of addiction off the shoulders of the poor by ridding them of the "pushers" of that era, the gangers and foremen who sold jobs in pubs and extorted a bounty on every day's work given.
In his poem, Jim Larkin, Paddy Kavanagh struck a prophetic chord:
And thus I heard Jim Larkin's ghost above
The Crowd who wanted to turn aside From reality coming to free them.
Terrified
They hid in the clouds of dope and would not move.
In the flat complexes of the inner city, where people stand up and say enough is enough, Larkin's ghost is stalking still.
