Interview With Eden Skehan, President Of The Postgraduate Workers’ Organization
The story that was largely missed by mainstream headlines was a simultaneous strike by an upstart union of postgraduate workers called the Postgraduate Workers' Organisation (PWO).
Coverage of striking action on the 14th of October was dominated by images of public sector workers on strikes. God bless, we hope they get their demands. The story that was largely missed by mainstream headlines was a simultaneous strike by an upstart union of postgraduate workers called the Postgraduate Workers' Organisation (PWO). We sat down with Eden Skehan, president of PWO to discuss the strike. She had this to say about the organisation:
“We are the postgraduate workers organization the PWO. We are a union for graduate workers in Ireland, so graduate workers include mostly PHD students but other workers as well. People on research masters degrees and people who are doing professional placements. For example people who are going for their higher medical degrees: doctors, psychiatrists or veterinary placements. All kinds of workers who because of their student status are not paid adequately for their work.”
When asked about the kinds of demands made by the union on behalf of their members Eden laid out the disputes regarding poor pay for postgraduate labour:
“We need a living wage: the average wage for postgraduate workers in Ireland is 25,000 euro per year which is over 4000 euro under minimum wage, so we are not even making minimum wage, which means we are not paying tax. When you're not paying tax you can’t contribute to PRSI and the PAYE system, so we can't access many social supports, including housing assistance payment (HAP).”
“We can’t have benefits paid towards our healthcare, we are in trouble if for some reason we have to leave the degree we have no contributions towards jobseekers allowance.
For non EU workers they can not access the dole and so we do not have access to the kind of social security net most other workers have access to, even though we are working sometimes 60 hour work weeks, and really trying to contribute to our universities”
Eden continued this point by explaining the kinds of labour expected of postgraduate workers on behalf of the university:
“Without graduate researcher labour universities as they currently exist in Ireland would be impossible, not only do we teach tutorials and labs that are a cornerstone of university education.”
“If graduate workers don't take up the mantle then undergraduates won’t get taught. Undergraduates won't get a full education and it will not be up to the standard of the European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS). The university works because we work”
“So not only are we producing top quality professional and published research that is equivalent to the research produced by full time staff members, we are routinely doing professional advocacy for our universities on an international stage... which is labour that is not paid or recognised sufficiently...”
“There is no difference between what we do and what recognised researchers do” “A lot of us end up doing the grunt work within schools which make other university activities possible. A lot of us organize our schools seminars, where researchers gather to listen to an expert or share their own work with peers. It's very important for the research process and developing a research culture, a lot of that is done by graduate workers”
Eden further explains the lack of parity in pay and representation between postgraduate workers and other officially recognised forms of academic labour within the university
“A lot of the work of representing graduate workers is done outside the existing student union capacity, the payment for this labour has no standard compensation. Some recognised researchers get paid an administrative fee for doing this, this differs wildly from school to school. Some get paid at the same rate as teaching a tutorial, others get nothing”
Beyond the immediate aims of the recognition of labour and fair pay for its members, Eden detailed other key demands that are fueling this workplace dispute:
“We also have a demand about protection from unfair dismissals, because currently the disciplinary procedure is the same as for undergraduate students.” Which is wildly inappropriate because “their entire livelihoods don't usually depend on access to the university, this is our job, this is our life.”
“We are worried about this as a union because a lot of graduate workers by nature of their registration with the university or the temporary contracts they signed for teaching duties. Have many of the protections of the unfair dismissals act disqualified for them. We don’t have the same protections as other workers”
Life for postgraduate workers would also being put under intolerable strain by proposed changes to the pathway to citizenship:
“Jim O’Callaghan, the minister for justice migration and home affairs is trying to extend the years of reckonable residence that one must accrue from 5 years to 8 years, this massively effects graduate workers, many of us migrate to Ireland to contribute to Ireland's research and development, but as a result while we are doing our graduate research that does not count towards reckonable residence because we are on the same stamp 2 visa as undergraduate students. What that means in practice is that people can live for years without getting citizenship status. If you did your undergraduate degree here you can go as long as 16 years without being eligible for citizenship status. For people who just moved here for their PHD degree this can be between 12 and 15 years.”
“A lot of other unions are talking about non EU regulations excluding workers, for postgraduate workers this is an extremely important aspect of changes happening to this workplace from government decisions. Its pointless cruelty, its racist, its a way to divide and conquer us. For management to make people precarious and make people disappear”
“Not only is it unfair but it is a disincentive for people to do their critical research in Ireland”
“We have state of the art research centres which will be hurt by this, and we won't get the very best research”
Talking about how the existing arrangement effects not just postgraduate workers but workers as a whole, Eden had this to say:
“All of this is creating a workforce that is used to not having these protections but also a managerial force that is used to administering a workforce without these protections. And what we have seen time and time again in Irish universities is that precarity trickles up”
“First it was post graduate workers then it was doctoral candidates who are basically graduate workers with a recognised contract, then this goes up to adjunct staff, people who are full staff but who are signed on for three month contracts that they have to renew every time, so there's an extreme degree of anxiety and underpayment”
“This is one of the reasons that IFUT, SIPTU and Unite are also participating in this public workers strike, to try and stop this flood of precarity, but it all started with graduate workers. Graduate workers are a laboratory for how to fuck over workers in Ireland”
Speaking on her experiences on the frontline of the strike Eden had this to say:
“When you have a workforce that is used to being beaten down and underprivileged, they will tolerate it unless they fight for something new and realize the value of their work and the dignity that they deserve. That is why we created the union and why we have gone on strike”
“At our biggest picket in UCD we had about a hundred... graduate workers throughout the day. For a lot of them this was their first protest, but they knew the importance of solidarity with other workers on strike. We’re giving people the opportunity to be empowered, stand up and respect themselves and respect their work and how important it is for the university, it was a really beautiful moment”
“it was one of the most heart-warming experiences I’ve ever had on a picket” “There were similar numbers in Trinity, Galway, UCC, DCU, Maynooth and less in Sligo, other universities such as RCSI had workers who were striking but not necessarily on the picket. “Across the country graduate workers have been rising with public workers, because we are public workers, our stipends are paid directly by the state, we have as much of an investment in standing in solidarity with other public sector workers as anybody.”
“People are fed up and angry and the union has given them hope. We're going to keep giving them hope and we're going to keep fighting, and at the end of the day we're going to win. This is only the beginning. “
Finishing on what this means for union organizing more generally, Eden finished with this:
The PWO is a wonderful experiment in how to organize precarious workers in Ireland. We want this to start conversations with other unions about how to organize for a twenty first century workplace, because work in Ireland is changing and unless we as unions adapt to those conditions we won't be able to fight effectively in these workplaces. PWO is an experiment, and an experiment that has been going very very well”
In reading this account in the context of the recent historical analysis of the Irish trade union movement conducted by Adrian Kane over at An Clógan (1.). It seems apparent that building towards mass union membership and the dream of ‘one big union’ will involve recognised unions being willing to stand in solidarity with precarious workers whose labour may sit outside the narrow specified confines of union participation as dictated by the social integration model.
We can not allow ourselves to be picked off industry by industry and must stand with those with less institutional power and privilege. As the old line goes, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
We’ll give the final word to Eden Skehan:
“Well see everybody else on the pickets on the 21st It’ll be a great time!”
- https://www.anclogan.ie/union-renewal-rediscovering-the-power-of-one-big-union-for-the-digital generation/
