Speech by President Michael D. Higgins, Robert Tressell Festival
Liberty Hall, Dublin. Saturday, 11th May 2024
A cháirde,
May I thank Jack O’Connor for the invitation to be with you and for those very kind words of introduction.
I am delighted to be with you all today as part of the Robert Tressell Festival, an event that has achieved a unique character as an important annual occasion for reflection and celebration of the power of the collective, for all those involved in the trade union movement, those supportive in diverse ways of workers’ rights, indeed all those with an interest in social justice and the achievement of an ethical society and economy.
Tá áthas orm a bheith libh inniu ag an bhFéile Robert Tressell, atá anois mar ócáid thábhachtach bhliantúil dó siúd a bhfuil baint acu leis an ghluaiseacht ceardchumainn, cearta na n-oibrithe, nó aon duine a bhfuil spéis acu i gcearta sóisialta agus sochaí agus eacnamaíocht eiticiúil a chruthú
This annual conference takes its title, and pays tribute, to the famous book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Noonan, who wrote under the nom-de-plume Robert Tressell.
Lengthy and complex, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists sometimes known as the “Painters’ Bible”, is an important classic of working-class literature. It stands as a great refutation of those who questioned the existence of a ‘culture of the working class’. Together with other expositions on the growing poverty of the early 20th century, such as The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell, dealing with the 1930s, it is perceived by some commentators as having had had an influence on the election of a transformational Labour Government in Britain in 1945.
Clement Attlee, who succeeded Winston Churchill in 1945 as British Prime Minister, oversaw a remarkable time. The Labour government of Attlee, during the years between 1945 and 1951, gave birth to what we now know as the welfare state, the establishment of the National Health Service, for example, by Aneurin Bevin giving free healthcare to all British citizens, and other reforms to welfare benefits.
Three years before Attlee’s government came to power, in 1942, economist William Beveridge had produced the Beveridge Report, in which he spelled out a system of social insurance, covering every citizen regardless of income.
It may perhaps have been the threat of such a militancy as might emerge, rather than any developing benign outrage at poverty that became a powerful influence, one that saw the necessity and benefit of state action and Keynesian policy.
That Beveridge Report offered a powerful evidence for a cradle-to-grave welfare state. It became the blueprint for the modern welfare state that the United Kingdom aspired to create, one that would face regular reversals over the succeeding decades. In Ireland’s case, poverty was understood but relieved by emigration. It would be 1974 before poverty was ‘discovered’ at a defining and uplifting moment that was the Kilkenny Conference on Poverty, and institutions such as Combat Poverty emerged, all to be ended within a generation by a jealous state bureaucracy with the abolition of Combat Poverty Agency in 2008.
The 1940s was a time of the birth of the debate on universalism in terms of welfare benefits, of human need and capacity. What was informed by the activity of such as the Oxford Movement was an advocacy for recognition of the issues facing the working classes, compassion at best, followed by carefully costed intervention. Recognising citizenship rights, of participation, was a very different radical proposal to developed notions of the ‘deserving poor’.
Universalism, as a contested term, is one that has been the source of competing versions in terms of range and capacity. I think for example of the enlightened version advocated by Richard Titmuss, former Professor of Social Policy at the London School of Economics and arguably one of the key intellectual theorists of Britain’s welfare state and National Health Service.
His vision was one symbolised by a culture of social solidarity, one that was delivered by institutions such as that great human achievement that is the NHS, providing initially, as it did, publicly funded hospital care for soldiers returning from war. His vision included a public version of social insurance and pension security.
That version of universalism which Titmuss elucidated in his seminal 1970 book, The Gift Relationship, constituted a manifesto on the advantages of a free health system over a privatised version, on how altruism binds societies together, building people’s capacity to care for each other.
Thatcherism on the other hand consciously set out to quench universalism in policy, contesting the very concept of society itself, supplanting any references to it with a neoliberalism manifesting as an extreme individualism and laissez-faire economics combined with neo-conservatism’s demands for robust small government and social authoritarianism.
Thatcherism would be responsible for the enacting of a spate of anti-union laws, laws that continue to make strike action difficult to this day, often attempting to make industrial action either illegal or unsuccessful.
Joining the union was, and it remains today, the best opposition to this particular attack on democracy.
As I reflect on the trade-union movement during my lifetime, I am struck by how clearly certain aspects of it have retained a special place in my memories. The image I recover is of banners, bands, marches, speeches in the public space – great speeches – which people would debate on the way home, some of the phrases of which they would make their own. This is a subject which I describe in my poem “Of Saturdays Made Holy”.
That is a proud tradition. One thinks of how it makes its way into the hearts of those who were struggling for freedom in their different ways. There are so many songs on the theme of “I’m off to join the union”. Many early trade union organisers, such as labour activists like Swedish-American Joe Hill, realised the importance of culture, of time spent together, of music shared, of songs in whose rendering workers competed for excellence. This is true of the docks, of the mines, of the factories. It is part of the symbolic life of a collective that shared values of universalism. It is the very antithesis of extreme individualism.
This was a powerful tradition from which Civil Rights movements, the Anti-Apartheid movement, and Equal Rights movements could call on for support. It is important that on all parts of this island we acknowledge the role of the trade union movement from its beginnings down to our times in opposing sectarianism.
That trade unions are giving leadership in taking the opportunity to provide that strong voice in support of universalism, in support of a strong welfare state, an argument that is evidence-based and has ample empirical basis, is so welcome.
As we reflect on Robert Tressell, I suggest that his genius, too, was the significance he accorded to the human figures of the workers, while his portrayal of typical characters in typical circumstances, of capitalist expression, allowed for the emergence of the heroism of the collective, thereby revolutionising the genre and contributing to socialist realism in the English novel.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist is an epic portrait of working-class existence in the throes of imperialism. In his novel, an impoverished group of workers takes centre-stage in an English novel. Theirs is a shared experience of exploitation and the sharing of meanings and feelings of the exploited which constitutes a culture that has composition and capacity for radical change.
An important theme in the novel is the scamping of work, as Jennie Farrell has written of. Misery commands the workers non-stop to “slobber it on”, cover dirt, cracks and structural weaknesses for long enough for the profits to be pocketed. While this is archetypal in the nature of capitalist work ethic, it also epitomises the general evolution to a Weberian alienation within industrial society, one which will come to characterise and service imperialist society. Falsity of appearance masks the real, becomes emblematic of the imperialist edifice, and its supporting industrial structure, one in which corruption, fraud and structural weaknesses are covered with a shoddy façade of illusory luxury and gratification.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist falls into a similar category of seminal Left texts such as George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, that sociological investigation of the bleak living conditions among the working class in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the industrial north of England before World War II, as well as a reflection on class, and the development of Orwell’s political conscience.
Indeed it was George Orwell himself who described The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as “a book that everyone should read”. Well over one million copies of the book have been sold, but an unabridged edition with Noonan’s original ending was only published as late as 1955, early publishers having removed much of the socialist ideology from the first edition.
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and The Road to Wigan Pier were followed some decades later, in 1969, by anthropological works such as Coal Is Our Life by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter, an analysis of a Yorkshire mining community and the relationship between the working environment and family and leisure roles.
Just like the space of life and indeed Beveridge’s welfare state, Tressell’s depiction of working-class life is traced from the cradle to the grave, all the way from Easton’s baby, through to Jack Linden who dies in a workhouse after a life of hard labour.
As Jennie Farrell has noted, “While the working-class characters are individualised, the bosses are types. Working life potentially encompasses all aspects of truly human living, while the ruling class is beyond consideration as a human way of life; its purpose being to thwart the workers’ free development”.
This is a brilliant reversal of the more usual presentation of individualised middle-class lives and worker stereotypes, still propagated in contemporary novels.
The power beyond the self is a theme that has informed so many emancipatory ideas, not least transcendental systems. It is a topic to which trade unions have a role to play in delivering an alternative to our current circumstances in which many find themselves “consumed by their consumption”, as Zygmunt Bauman put it, towards a higher consciousness, a state of resonance with each other, as philosopher Hartmut Rosa would argue.
Tressell’s book advocates to a socialist society in which work is performed to satisfy the needs of all, rather than to generate profit for a few. Many have referred to “The Great Money Trick” as a key chapter, in which the character Frank Owen, a socialist, organises a mock-up of capitalism with his workmates, using slices of bread as raw materials and knives as machinery. Owen ‘employs’ his workmates cutting up the bread to illustrate that the employer, who does not work, generates personal wealth while the workers effectively remain no better off than when they began, endlessly swapping coins back and forth for food and wages. This is Tressell’s practical way of illustrating the Marxist theory of surplus value, which in the capitalist system is generated by labour.
A major recurring motif in Tressell’s book highlights the inability and reluctance of the workers to comprehend, or even contemplate, an alternative economic paradigm. The author attributes this inability, inter alia, to the fact that they have never experienced an alternative paradigm, and have been raised as children to unquestioningly accept the status quo, whether or not it is in their interests.
This is a theme found in Plato’s work, someone Tressell admired. In Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave, the underlying narrative suggests that in the absence of an alternative, human beings will submit to their present condition and consider it normal, no matter how contrived or perverse the circumstances.
This is a cautionary parable that retains a significance in our present circumstances having lived through four decades of unfettered neoliberalism with all its pernicious consequences on society.
It is so significant that the discussions today, hopefully between songs, are punctuated with music, with performance.
I myself have been a proud trade unionist since my teens and all through my adult life. I was the founder in 1969 of the teaching section of the Workers’ Union of Ireland, which later became part of SIPTU. I was aware from a young age of the power of a union, of which Billy Bragg would later sing, of unions’ important role in history and their continuing role in delivering transformative societal change, including in our current circumstances.
The rights of workers today are sourced in the efforts of trade unionist women and men who took the risks over the decades and centuries. Ireland has a long and proud tradition of trade unionism – a movement which has played a key role in securing human rights, and in the Irish experience is inextricably interlinked with our nation’s struggle for independence.
Membership of a trade union has secured and protected the irreducible right to dignity in the workplace and in our society, ever more important in changing economic conditions globally and locally. History tells us that the best outcomes for workers, their defence and their prospects, continue to be best achieved by being a trade union member.
We, as trade unionists, as friends of trade unions, have much to celebrate. The growth in female participation in the labour market is matched by growing numbers of women joining trade unions. Union membership is increasingly becoming a membership that carries a female contribution with more women than men now members of trade unions.
When we reflect on Robert Tressell, and indeed the many other literary figures involved in working class literature and agitation, we are taking the opportunity to celebrate the lives of workers who have taken part in, or organised, marches, fought for their rights, and stood in solidarity with their colleagues, their fellow citizens, and with people all over the world, in struggles against injustice, inequality and exclusion in the workplace.
This Festival allows us to celebrate all that we have achieved together in the long and difficult struggle for workers’ rights in this country and across the globe as we continue to stand in solidarity with all those who suffer unfair and discriminatory work practices around the world. It is also a time to remember those who have suffered, and those who have paid the ultimate price, while undertaking their duties, as organisers of collective campaigning for workers’ rights.
It is to the trade union movement that workers can look with both ambition and realism, learn how to focus on what might be termed ‘the art of the possible’ that is embedded in the international vision that unions have historically exemplified, envisioned in terms of what we can achieve together, tapping humans’ endless capabilities within a framework of protective, inclusive labour rights, rights that safeguard workers, particularly the most vulnerable.
The trade union movement in Ireland, the European Union and indeed the world now faces a number of challenges, challenges to which we must all lend a shoulder if the wheel is to be made turn.
Union membership is in decline in Ireland, and the coverage of collective bargaining continues to fall, perhaps as low as 40 percent of the workforce, has fallen by more than ten percentage points over the past two decades. Only a quarter of the workforce are members of trade unions, compared with 91 percent in Iceland, 81 percent in Cuba and 67 percent in Denmark.
Membership remains heavily age-dependent, with only 14 percent of young workers (those aged 16-24) being members of a union, compared to 45 percent of those aged 55-64.
Today many sectors remain outside of union membership, or demonstrate remarkably low membership rates, including hospitality, aviation, information and communication, and manufacturing and construction (all below 20 percent).
Workers’ rights are never a given, are always under threat, and continue to be undermined and eroded – for example, with the emergence in recent years of the under-regulated ‘gig economy’ which has engendered minimal rights for workers with equally minimal responsibilities for employers.
Most dangerous of all, the military-industrial complex governs our lives, demands resources that should be addressing great human challenges.
Workers today face so many challenges in the most basic aspects of their lives. We are living through a housing crisis, one that is sourced in an over-reliance on market provision, laissez-faire economics and an ideological antipathy to state intervention.
A transformation has to be achieved in how we think of public expenditure, of State investment, of the public sector in general, all of which is too often described as a “cost” or a “burden”. Public spending must come to be viewed as a productive investment in our communities, our society and our economy.
Some parts of Europe, notably the Nordic countries, have reaped the benefits of high levels of social expenditure over the decades. Yet we in Ireland remain fixated on minimising the state, reducing the tax burden, privatising state assets, deregulation, and a commitment to public services that can at best be described as tentative or piecemeal.
Even prior to Covid, unions in partnership with employers and civic society representatives, a valuable positive partnership and dialogue, were contemplating the substantial impacts of technology, automation, digitalisation and globalisation on the future of work and the impacts of climate policies for workers in carbon-intensive sectors.
A Just Transition must be achieved for such workers. We must commit to ensuring that workers will be at the frontline in defining our response to climate change. We have good scholarly work available to us, such as the report by the National Economic and Social Council on this topic.
Trade unions, I believe, are showing that they have the capacity to be leaders of the Just Transition, arguing for its compelling case and championing its delivery. The importance of achieving a Just Transition – based on the principles of equality, participation, and protection of the marginalised – is ever more relevant because of the pandemic, its aftermath and how we design our recovery, and is aligned with our obligations under the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, our blueprint for a sustainable, inclusive, shared future.
The trade union movement is strongest when it is a movement that knows no borders. Achieving the unionisation of Africa must become a reality. Trade union organisation in Africa is weak at the national, regional and continental levels, and is primarily limited to the formal sector, resulting in only the interests of a minority of the working population being represented. Improved social dialogue on key issues of employment and social protection must be encouraged.
We have reasons to be hopeful – for example, in South America we see unionisation levels rising and unions playing critical roles in promoting social dialogue on issues such as ensuring a Just Transition, precarious jobs, and the elimination of gender-based violence in the workplace.
The challenge remains of creating a society that is more equal, one in which all work is valued, without discrimination or being narrowly defined by the market, a society where all jobs are decent, fulfilling and secure, together with adequate social protection.
Workers in the care sector are in one of the most important parts of our society and their work deserves that this be recognised.
Mar fhocal scoir, let us take the opportunity that the Robert Tressell Festival represents to re-affirm together our commitment to playing our part in the creation of a society that removes the obstacles standing between so many of our people and their full participation.
Above all, let us affirm our opposition to the great human failure that is war. Future generations are being prepared not for ecological responsibility but for endless conflict.
So much is possible, and can be made possible, through our collective action. For so many around the world, the battle for decent work and all it entails continues to be one of the defining struggles of our times, one that can be genuinely inclusive, emancipatory and joyful for all who participate in the cause.
Let us stand in solidarity with the most vulnerable, lowest paid and least protected workers in society. Let us defend their rights as the founders of the trade union movement did more than a century ago at the time of publication of Robert Tressell’s classic book which we celebrate today.
Go raibh maith agat. Beir beannacht.