******* The Dunnes Strike & Managing Change  *******
      -- the two souls of Irish trade unionism.
                              Guest Writer

For three weeks, in June-July, nearly 6,000 mostly 
young and part-time workers struck against Ireland's 
largest private sector employer, the firmly anti-union 
Dunnes Stores, over Sunday trading, zero-hours 
contracts, the proportion of full-time jobs and other 
issues. But the principal, and unstated, issues were 
probably union recognition and the organisation of the 
newly emergent semi-casual, part-time, young (and 
mainly female) section of the labour force.  The 
result, while disappointing on the concrete 'economic' 
issues, was generally greeted as something of a 
breakthrough on the latter 'political' issues.

Power in the darkness.

The Dunnes Stores strike came upon a sickly, scared and 
handcuffed trade union movement with the healing touch 
of restoration.  It stood in sharp contrast to the grim 
series of industrial disputes that preceded it.  
Previous disputes at Packard, TEAM Aer Lingus, Irish 
Steel, Pat the Baker, Nolans resulted in demoralising 
defeats which seemed to deliver further body blows to a 
downwardly debilitating movement.

Everybody in the labour movement seems to agree on the 
positive significance of the Dunnes strike. The 
Biennial Conference of the Irish Congress of Trade 
Unions (ICTU) in Tralee, which overlapped last July 
with the final week of the strike, was reportedly 
overjoyed at the outcome.  Peter Cassels, ICTU General 
Secretary, congratulated the Labour Court on its 
recommendation. 

At the other end of the spectrum responses were even 
more enthusiastic if with a different focus. "The 
Dunnes strike was a turning point", said Socialist 
Worker1.  Militant declared:  "The Dunnes strike can be 
the start of a general fight back by the working class" 
and "In many ways it has an historic significance."2

The Dunnes strike revealed to all that not alone was 
there still fight left in the trade union movement, but 
it was present where it was widely unexpected, among 
young, unorganised, part-time workers.  It provided 
almost the first example in the last three years of a 
sucessful strike.  Furthermore the Dunnes workers 
received the almost universal support of the general 
public, the media, the political parties, the Church, 
the state (which paid them the dole!), celebrities 
(even Boyzone!) and the trade union leadership.  What 
refreshment, after the pillorying of the Irish Steel 
and TEAM craftworkers, the isolation of the Pat the 
Baker and Nolans Transport strikers, the (varying) 
sympathy for, but apparent helplessness of the Packard 
Electric workers.

Preceding elation was relief, on all sides of the 
movement. The left dreaded another defeat.3  Even the 
Congress leaders could see that a defeat for MANDATE4 
in Dunnes would be a devastating blow to trade union 
strength and what place have generals without an army?  
On top of that Dunnes would have scored this triumph 
outside of the carefully built-up industrial relations 
machinery to which officialdom is so committed.5

Why the Dunnes strike won

Different sectors interpreted the victory in different 
ways.  Two remarkable features of the strike were the 
professional public relations campaign of MANDATE and 
the overwhelming support of shoppers in refusing to 
enter the stores.  Michael Foley, the Media 
Corespondent of the Irish Times, under a sub-heading 
stating, "the Dunnes Stores strike was fought and won 
on television, radio and in the newspapers", wrote: 
"The picket line in the Dunnes Stores dispute was not a 
way of ensuring that the stores remained closed or a 
method of convincing others not to trade with the 
company, but a media event, a photo opportunity and an 
opportunity for sound bites".6

On the same page it was reported, in relation to "the 
success of the strike", that "senior members of the 
ICTU took the opportunity of the organisation's 
biennial conference in Tralee this week to hammer home 
repeatedly to members the importance of using 
industrial relations procedures to the maximum and the 
necessity of mobilising public support, as well as 
industrial muscle, if disputes were going to be fought 
and won."7

Here the accidental is emphasised over the essential.  
The Dunnes strike revolved around two issues.  The 
first is that MANDATE had the numbers and used  them, 
not least in legally dodgy mass pickets.  The second is 
that the refusal of the company to use the industrial 
relations procedures underlined the irrelevance of any 
mediating machinery to the workers without industrial 
action.

A more satisfying analysis was given by Dermot Connolly 
writing in Militant as follows: "In contrast (to the 
half-hearted conduct of previous disputes by the 
unions) the Dunnes strike was superbly organised.  They 
(MANDATE's officials and executive) knew that Dunnes 
were out to break the union and worked non-stop for six 
weeks to prepare the membership and counter every 
attempt by management to sow confusion and split the 
ranks.  A national shop stewards committee was formed 
along with strike committees in the shops, mass 
picketing was encouraged.  ICTU was pressurised into 
calling for a boycott of Dunnes and urging workers with 
their suppliers not to pass pickets.  They didn't hide 
behind the need to call ballots before doing this as 
they have claimed to be the case in other disputes. A 
glimpse of the real potential power of the trade union 
movement was shown, and at the same time the fact that 
all the weaknesses of the unions to-day, the so-called 
decline in solidarity,8the inability to organise 
serious struggles comes from the top." 9

The emphasis here is on shop floor organisation, 
militancy, industrial solidarity and the mass activity 
of the members themselves (rather than token 
picketlines) as the key essentials to the success of 
the strike.

Managing Change

If the Dunnes strike was a 'turning point', there was 
also another turning point (or rather, another turn of 
the screw) at the same time.  The Biennial Conference 
of the ICTU showed the second of the two souls of Irish 
trade unionism.  The ICTU planted yet another milestone 
in the road of 'partnership' and 'consensus' with the 
adoption of the document Managing Change and Motion 19.

Managing Change is the latest development of what Peter 
Cassels, ICTU General Secretary, refers to as "the 
trade union agenda for a new century".10  It follows a 
long line of Congress documents including "New Forms of 
Work Organisation" from the 1993 Conference.

The 1993 paper advised a new co-operative or 
participatory approach to such things as human resource 
management, world class manufacturing and total quality 
control: precisely the kind of new management 
techniques that lay-activists had hitherto been warned 
about as undermining trade union organisation. 
Commenting on the paper Peter Cassels said, "to 
innovate effectively... requires a high trust 
environment with workers and their unions accepted by 
companies as partners in the enterprises."11

Local consensus was taken some steps further at this 
year's conference, where 1995's theme paper was 
Managing Change. The Irish Times prŽcised its contents 
thus: "Accepting that global markets and the speed of 
technological change now make company restructuring an 
almost constant process, Congress wants member-unions 
to become pro-active in this situation.  Traditionally 
unions have resisted change and have focused on 
defending members' rights.  ICTU wants to reverse that 
role."12

Plainly Congress has no problem with the logic of 
redundancies and worsened conditions.  As the trade 
union leadership entered into a joint economic, social 
and (on many issues) political strategy with the 
government and the employers through the National 
Programmes, embracing austerity in the '80s, it has now 
accepted a consensus approach to new management 
techniques and 'rationalisation', in the individual 
firm, embracing competitiveness in the '90s.  At both 
levels the same strategy is applied: accommodation 
rather than resistance.   At both levels the same 
justification is given: let us get in on it, in order 
to influence it!

Myth and Reality

The reality of the workplace is  remote from the myth  
of cosy  partnership.  Relentlessly employers have 
continued to 'rationalise' and 'restructure' with 
redundancies, natural wastage, conversion to contract 
labour, new 'yellowpack' starting rates, flexibility 
and new work practices often gained by threats of 
closure.  It's not just at Packard that things thought 
long-buried, like straight wage cuts or longer working 
weeks, have returned from labour history. The very 
unions  themselves are being undermined by their 
'social partners' through the dismantling of shop floor 
organisation, 'no-strike' clauses, generosity to non-
union people and, of course, 'human resource' 
techniques.

Matt Merrigan, former President of Congress, says it in 
his own inimitable style: "Trade unionists in the 
workplace see no evidence of the shared duties, 
responsibilities and decision-making that are inferred 
in the texts of these programmes.  Consensus and 
partnership are not in the lexicon of individual 
employers at plant level, rather it is: comply or 
else."13   Perhaps the current President of Congress 
might give us a lexicon of the companies with a "high 
trust environment".  Aer Lingus, Allied Irish 
Banks....Zoe Developments?

This year's model, Managing Change  develops workplace 
partnership from the general operation and development 
of the firm into the specific area of 'change'.  Thus 
Congress addresses a current concern of the pundits of 
capital: the globalisation of capital and the 
consequent 'need' for rationalisation and 'downsizing' 
as general and constant features rather than just in 
the odd ailing company. It also addresses the 
continuing restructuring, part privatisation and 
exposure to competition of the semi-state sector - as 
seen in the past at An Post, Irish Steel, TEAM and in 
the coming year at the ESB14 and Telecom Eireann.

A new world?

The motif of 'competitiveness' running through 
workplace partnership and the current union-employer-
government agreement (the Programme for Competitiveness 
and Work) does not make a good match with trade 
unionism, which one was led to believe arose as an 
antidote to competition between companies and between 
workers themselves.15 It blends well though with a 
revamped world-view placing the trade union eggs in the 
basket of the EU, the Maastricht Treaty, a strong 
currency and the European Social Charter.  A world view 
that sees itself getting behind the perceived dawn of 
new technology.  A world views that seeks to sail with 
a restructuring capitalism and the ascendancy of new 
right ideology.  One which compensates for the decline 
in labour militancy by seeking to place trade union 
relevance elsewhere than in the class struggle.  This 
results in a half- belief in the end of the working 
class as an entity and the transformation of its 
members into consumers.

It is a political economy based on the OECD, the ESRI 
and the NESC16.  Once, and not so long ago, the 
economic policies of trade union leaders was based 
largely on state enterprise and the public sector.  
This underlying doctrine has been replaced without 
acknowledgement.  A discredited statism has been 
replaced by a fatalistic adoption of the market; a loss 
of belief in any kind of 'socialist' alternative 
replaced with a 'new realism' that contends there is no 
basic alternative.

This creeping conversion has to some extent been 
fuelled latterly by the collapse of the 'Soviet' bloc, 
towards which many union leaders and backroom gurus 
sidewardly looked. 17

Just how far into the business ethos things have gone 
is illustrated in the ICTU 1995 Pre-Budget Submission, 
which declares: "Improved competitiveness is crucial 
for economic growth and job creation and must be 
protected from upward pressure on pay and inflation." 
Once it was the employers and government ministers who 
said that wage rises cause inflation and unemployment.  
John O'Dowd, General Secretary of the Civil and Public 
Services Union (CPSU), writing in the Sunday Tribune in 
August about the need for confidence in the "change 
process" in Telecom Eireann (i.e. the cutting of 
several thousand jobs) said, "competition is here to 
stay and Telecom staff depend on achieving, and 
sustaining competitive advantage within this new 
environment."18

As with much of the unions' thinking over the past 
decade Managing Change is a legislation of existing 
practice. There is nothing new about union officials 
arguing for an employer's proposals - or a compromise 
version of them - on the job.  Congress brought this to 
a high point in 1994, the centenary of its foundation, 
by becoming the 'persuader' in Irish Steel and TEAM Aer 
Lingus alongside employers, politicians and the media.  
Actually, Managing Change and Motion 19 arose directly 
out of a review group established by Congress to 
investigate 'what went wrong' in these two cases (where 
some workers were hard to persuade). 

Managing change - never had a policy a more apt title.  
The system requires regular change, to ensure 
competitiveness and profitability.  There's a need for 
an apparatus - complete with apparatchiks - for its 
smooth operation. The rough edges of the employers' 
proposals may have to be trimmed.  The workforce will 
be delivered up to accept the essence of the changes 
all systematised through a prepared procedure.  No more 
cliff-side ballots, no more embarrassing blockades on 
the Airport Road, no more 'workers vote for sucide' 
newspaper articles, no (perish the thought) importation 
of Air France-type direct action resistance.

In the new schema, of course, it is the rank and file 
who live with the changes, while the leaders enter the 
corridors of power and increase their salaries. (The 
three General Officers of SIPTU receive £7O,OOO per 
annum, according to the Sunday Independent. 19 That's 
before car and expenses.)

Bureaucrats as policemen.

Managing Change extends the domain of the persuader and 
of the police officer within the industrial relations 
process.  Peter Cassels, answering criticism20 that the 
ICTU might "whip the trade unions into line", said: 
"And if that requires us telling a trade union they're 
off-side we'll say they're off-side. And if it requires 
telling union members they're off-side, then we'll tell 
them they're off-side." 21

In defending the proposal for 'a pro-active approach to 
changes in work-practices' he said: "We have a choice, 
we can leave it to the employers to set the agenda and 
do what trade unionists have been doing in other 
countries and react. Or we can try and shape the 
future."  The Irish Times report continues: "He cited 
the fight to save jobs at Waterford Crystal and the 
Cost and Competitiveness Review in the ESB and Telecom 
Eireann as situations in which unions have seized the 
initiative in shaping change".22  

These citations were unfortunate and upon them any 
'traditionalist' can rest his or her case.  The 
instance at Waterford Crystal was a signal defeat, the 
breaking of arguably the strongest and most class 
conscious group of Irish workers at the time.  The ESB 
and Telecom reviews are all about the loss of thousands 
of the best (and best-unionised) jobs in the country 
and the unions' happy cooperation with same!

Motion 19 puts Managing Change into specific points of 
policy. And here alarm bells ring as Congress once 
again ties the hands of its members.  Motion 19 
proposed "the conclusion of a Framework Document with 
employer bodies on how change in the workplace should 
be negotiated."23  Congress not only want to "lead the 
charge for change" (Peter Cassels again) but it wants a 
centralised agreement to govern how it is approached. 
The local element as a feature of workplace partnership 
didn't get very far, did it?

This codified procedure would, without doubt, lay down 
how, when and where to negotiate and, above all, what 
to negotiate. Any pre-cooked negotiation schedule would 
have to give an assurance to the employers that the 
unions would not rule out negotiation, at least, on any 
proposal from local employers. Then the matter would go 
to the Labour Relations Commission (as specified in 
Motion 19) after which workers would be expected to 
ballot (or the Editorials would want to know why not) 
on a 'compromise' third-party recommendation.

As the National Programmes have, since 1987, removed 
the (offensive) power of workers to put claims to their 
own employers, this new centralised departure would 
remove, or severely undermine, the (defensive) power of 
workers to reject adverse changes in their own 
employment.  Any 'framework agreement' that emerges 
should go to a ballot and be campaigned against.

Furthermore Motion 19 calls for a measure that you 
might, if you were not up to speed with the charge to 
the right of the ICTU, have expected union leaders to 
denounce if IBEC, the employers' organisation, proposed 
it.  This is the introduction of mandatory use of third 
party machinery in procedures and disputes24. The first 
consideration is the fatal delay and sidetracking that 
can be involved in processing urgently needed 
industrial action through the labyrinth.  The second is 
the bias and the malleability of the Labour Relations 
Commission and the Labour Court.

Compulsory conciliation is, of course, well established 
in Irish industrial relations: in SIPTU (in practice), 
in the public service and legally for 'individual' 
disputes under the 1990 Industrial Relations Act.  What 
Motion 19 would do is to extend and copperfasten it 
into (here it comes again) national  arrangements with 
government and employer organisations.

Finally, the Motion establishes aggregate ballots where 
in certain situations Congress can insist on a single 
vote on a change package.  This is Congress' response 
to the Irish Steel crisis in which the craftworkers 
rejected the company's 'survival' plan which the 
majority (mainly SIPTU) general workers accepted. 
Congress and SIPTU supported the plan and will support 
similar plans in future situations. So Managing Change 
infers that the rejection of worsened conditions by an 
independent section is perceived, not as an opportunity 
upon which to build stronger opposition, but as a 
problem to be overcome by the majority votes of the 
already persuaded.  This pseudodemocracy takes no 
account of valid craft demarcations or cases where one 
section are asked to take more odious changes than 
another.

Two Souls

Overlapping as it was with the ICTU Conference, the 
Dunnes Stores strike (and its resolution) provided a 
special occasion to view the two souls of Irish trade 
unionism together.  Connections between the two were 
real enough, and some others were made by Congress 
leaders adopting the Dunnes experience and by 
journalists juxtaposing two major industrial events.

The Dunnes dispute was used specifically by Phil Flynn 
as an example of the need for "mandatory third-party 
reference of disputes".25  Through Dunnes-and their 
refusal to even attend the LRC - the 'innovators' have 
been able to portray mandatory mediation as a 
constraint upon the employers while overlooking its 
suffocating effect on workers' action. This portrayal 
is easily achieved because third-party referral is now 
almost automatic on the union side, because of the 
unions' own dispute procedures and because of the 
prevalent lack of confidence among workers about having 
a straight fight.  It's the employers who are perceived 
to be beyond this due process and who need to be tied 
into it through a tripartheid commitment.

Commentators painted the strike as a watershed to which 
the ICTU's Tralee agenda corresponded.  Padraig Yeates, 
Industry and Employment Correspondent of the Irish 
Times first appeared to acknowledge the differences 
between them: "ln many ways the Dunnes Stores strike is 
a very traditional one, about defending basic workers' 
rights rather than mediating change to meet the needs 
of 'global' competition".  This perception 
notwithstanding he goes on, "yet delegates are keenly 
aware that the Dunnes Stores dispute is just as 
relevant to the ICTU's modern agenda."  By way of 
explanation for this relevance he continues: "It is the 
first national strike involving a new generation of 
part-time workers who are only just begining to join 
unions." 26 This was precisely the strike's 
significance, but not its relevance to the modern 
agenda.

Perhaps Padraig Yeates was reflecting the connection 
which Congress thinkers make to justify the modern 
agenda, as an adaption to the emergent generation of 
casualised and unorganised young workers - through 
consensus rather than struggle!  In Towards A New 
Century, a veritable manifesto of  new unionism, Peter 
Cassels writes: "Labour market changes are also 
producing a 'new' and growing workforce of part-time, 
temporary, casual, contract and home workers...The 
changing composition of the workforce is changing the 
content of the trade union agenda which in turn is 
changing how we process that agenda." 27

The Dunnes strike has demonstrated that the road ahead, 
in trade union terms, for this new generation is not 
the 'new agenda'.  A good old fashioned strike has more 
claim to that (more but not all - some real tactical 
head-scratching is needed, for example, in relation to 
struggle at mobile multinationals).

"The start of a general fightback" it could be, yet 
even its own resolution was a steadying reminder that 
the other soul (the consensus loving one) envelopes 
even the great Dunnes strike with its deadening 
presence.  An outsider might conclude that MANDATE 
halted the march just when they had Dunnes on the run. 
One insider described it as, "Let's not lose, rather 
than win".28 

Of course the recommendation to call off the strike 
after three weeks may have been prudent, rather than 
weak-kneed, leadership: avoiding a long industrial 
campaign with raw recruits.  The same insider claims, 
however, that "the general feeling of the activist 
layer in MANDATE was against the Labour Court 
recommendation"29 The Sunday Tribune quotes one shop 
steward as saying, "we've been sold out."30  The 
reccommendation was accepted by nearly four to one in 
MANDATE.

One way or the other, a great triumph of the strike was 
that a powerful and determinedly anti-union employer, 
employing a 'new' and casualised workforce, was forced 
to grant de facto recognition to the union.  But the 
settlements on the particular issues upon which the 
strike was fought represent rather modest gains and, in 
some cases, could set unfavourable precedents in the 
retail industry.

The settlement

Compulsory Sunday working was accepted and extended to 
the previously exempt pre-October 1994 workers.  It 
seems a kind of mockery that European law and practice 
is continually used to get workers to take changes and 
comply with the norm while Ireland is the only state in 
the EU where Sunday trading is permitted without any 
regulation. 

The elimination of  'zero-hour' (on-call) contracts was 
a major achievement.  Under the settlement there's a 
minimum of fifteen hours a week work for part-timers 
and split shifts are abolished.

Although the Labour Court recommend time-and-a-half for 
Sunday working (as against Dunnes' demand for flat-rate 
working for new workers) this sets up two pay rates for 
the same work (senior workers keep double time) and is 
below rates enjoyed in some other union stores.  On the 
ratio of full-time to part-time posts the settlement 
(two hundred extra full-time posts) makes no 
qualitative difference in a workforce of 6,000.

Our 'insider' reflects as follows: "In drawing up a 
balance sheet of the strike it would be wrong to say 
that defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory, or 
even that the outcome was a draw.  From where this 
dispute started, the gains won were greater than the 
concessions made.  Dunnes set out to break the union, 
and achieved the opposite.  The union is stronger than 
at any time in the past.  The members are more 
confident and a new layer of militants will come into 
activity."31

Perhaps the main achievement was the 'political' one of 
the moderately successful arrival of this large sector 
of atomised young workers - feared by some to be beyond 
the pale of trade unionism - on the stage of organised 
working class struggle.  Plus, perhaps, the uplifting 
impact of the strike on the consciousness of workers in 
general.

It might have been expected that in the aftermath of 
the strike the official trade union milieu arrived at 
some new conclusions on how to organise industrial 
struggle.  This certainly didn't happen immediately.  
At the end of the same month, at another retail giant, 
the Marks and Spencer stores in Dublin, there was 
another three-week strike, this time by SIPTU warehouse 
workers centring on changes in shift patterns.  On 
approaching the (Mary St) store it was evident that 
while the usual amount of shoppers was down there was 
still a good number inside.  Where had the remarkable 
support of shoppers gone in three weeks?  A large part 
of the answer was surely that the vast majority of the 
workers, including the shop assistants who are MANDATE 
members, were still working away!  It seemed that the 
Dunnes strike had made little impact on the official 
world of SIPTU (who were absurdly asking shoppers not 
to patronise Marks and Spencer where their fellow trade 
unionists were quite clearly waiting to serve them).  
Neither had MANDATE been greatly effected as they 
seemed to have developed a sudden attack of 
forgetfulness, thereby enabling the very thing they'd 
feared a month earlier - the public passing the picket 
and a staff there to meet them.

A SIPTU picketer offered the information that they 
didn't want to ask the MANDATE members to come out at 
that stage.  Some of the picketers did not maintain 
this relaxed view of the picketline throughout, 
expressing strong disagreement with large vehicles, 
insisting on a relaxed approach of their own.  Part of 
the settlement of this strike was, incidentally, the 
establishment of a joint participative review of the 
warehouse operation which sounds awfully like an early 
application of Managing Change.

Padraig Yeates finished his thoughtful Irish Times 
commentary with: "The Dunnes Stores dispute highlights 
the crisis facing the trade union movement.  It will be 
up to the delegates (to the ICTU Conference) this week 
to decide if Congress is coming up with the right 
solutions."32  At the end of that week it would seem to 
be confirmed that the (at least) moderate success of 
the Dunnes strike, and the methods it employed, 
militant, organised and imaginative, met the crisis, 
and highlighted that Congress is coming up not with 
solutions but with problems.

Footnotes
1 Socialist Worker, 8-21 Jul. '95.
2 Militant, Jul.-Aug. '95.
3 Sporadic victories such as Blooms Hotel (Dublin), the 
Eastern Health Board (IMPACT) and Knightingales (Dublin 
store) had been stars too remote to lighten the 
darkness.
4 MANDATE, the main striking union, representing most 
Dunnes workers.
5 The ICTU's public intervention emphasised Dunnes' 
refusal to co-operate with the Labour Relations 
Commission.
6 Irish Times, 8-7-95.
7  Ibid.
8  The desert that was Dunnes answered, belatedly but 
baldly, the comment of the General Secretary of SIPTU 
(Ireland's largest union), Billy Attley, at a Union 
conference, that the Pat the Baker strikers (1993) had 
been beaten not by anything the unions did or didn't do 
but by  the "lack of solidarity" (by which he meant, 
people bought the bread).
9  Militant, op.cit.
10 P. Cassels, Towards A New Century in Trade Union 
Century, ed. D.Nevin (Mercier Press, 1994) p.427.
11 Sunday Tribune, 1-8-93 (my emphasis).
12  Padraig Yeates, Industrial and Employment 
Corespondent, Irish Times, 3-7-95.
13 Matt Merrigan, Co-operation is a capitalist asset, 
Irish Reporter No.17 (1995).
14  Electricity Supply Board.
15 Peter Cassels was this year appointed to the 
Competitiveness Advisory Group of the European Union 
(EU).
16 The last two are Irish economic think tanks.
17  Democratic Left are ex-stalinists currently in the 
Irish governing coalition.  An article in their 
magazine Times Change (don't they just) on The Future 
of Work by Sean Kelly ends: "In the global competitive 
trade wars that are now being witnessed it appears that 
the only source of job security for workers is 
satisfied customers." 
(Times Change, Autumn/Winter 1994.).
18 Sunday Tribune, 13-8-95.
19 Sunday Independent, 20-8-95. SIPTU (Services 
Industrial Professional Technical Union)
20 from TEEU delegate Tim Lawless at Tralee
21 Irish Times 6-7-95.
22 Ibid. 6-7-95.
23 Ibid. 3-7-95.
24  The reporting of this clause as proposing 
compulsory arbitration has sown confusion.  Compulsory 
arbitration is the compulsory acceptance of a third-
party decision while compulsory conciliation (the 
Motion 19 proposal) is the compulsory referral to a 
third party for recommendation.  There's one hell of a 
difference, and even I would not expect Congress to 
suddenly call a complete ceasefire in the class war.  
Apparently, it was 'clarified' at the Conference that 
this section was not 'prescriptive' and there would be 
'consultation' with unions further on.
25 Irish Times, 3-7-95. Phil Flynn, ICTU President, in 
the same interview, says that Dunnes Stores "is not 
anti-union, but non-union".
26 Ibid., 4-7-95
27 Towards a new Century, P.Cassels, op.cit. p.425.
28 A 'prominent Mandate activist' (anonymous), Militant 
op.cit.
29 Ibid..
30 Sunday Tribune, 9-7-95.
31 Militant, op. cit.
32 Irish Times, 4-7-95.

