This document discusses the history and potential future of worker cooperatives in Ireland. It outlines how interest in cooperatives has waxed and waned with the strength of the labor movement. While a wave of cooperatives formed in the 1970s-80s, most struggled against globalization and neoliberalism by the late 1980s. However, some case studies showed cooperatives can succeed given the right conditions. The document argues a new wave may be forming, as growing activism and interest in alternatives signals potential revival of worker cooperatives and labor struggle in Ireland.

1. Whither Industrial Democracy?
Irish Trade Unionism and the Cooperative Commonwealth

2. Workplace democracy revisited
 Resurgence of interest in worker cooperatives
 Political-economic and social-ecological instability

3. The cooperative path not taken
 Reflections on cooperativism and Irish independence

4. A forgotten cooperative history
 Irish worker cooperative development experience
 “Phoenix” cooperatives of 1970s/80s
 Worker coop development infrastructure

5. Rising from the ashes?
 Recent worker coop development initiatives
 Centred on Belfast
 Worker Cooperative Network

6. Long waves of cooperation
 Worker coop development rises and falls relative to strength of
labour movement
(Ramsay 1977; Gumbrell-McCormick and Hyman 2019)
‘[Workers’ control] is an extension of strong
trade union organisation’

7. Thatcherism delayed?
 Social partnership and the peace process
 Temporarily stalled Irish neoliberal turn
(McDonough and Dundon 2010; McCabe 2013)
‘[The 1980s were] different times, and you find
yourself now having to fight differently than we
used to have to fight . . . Partnership is gone’

8. Doomed to failure?
 Irish worker coop wave
 1980: 4 in South, 1 in North
 1998: 82 in South (591 workers)
 2014: circa 20 in South (135 workers)
‘[In Ireland] they tended to be in low-productivity,
labour-intensive type industries – furniture and
printing and . . . fuel [etc.] . . . which ran into, you
know, globalisation . . . They were never likely to
thrive [after the 1980s], because of cheap
competition’

9. Against all odds
 First wave case studies
 Quay Co-op
 Tullamore Meats Co-op
 Bord na Móna AEUs
 Attymon Peat Co-op
 Second wave (?) case studies
 Belfast Cleaning Society
 Union Taxis
 Evidence of sustainability potentials and practices
 Suggestive of hierarchy of cooperative needs

10. Lessons of cooperative history
CC
External
stakeholder
participation
Radical internal
workplace
democracy
Continuous internal
education
and training
Supportive
external institutional
environment
Suitable internal governance structure
Sense of collective identity
among workers
Essential business skills
Viable business idea

11. A new Irish worker coop wave?
 Signs of life
 Growing interest and activism
 Search for alternatives
 Pendulum swinging back?
 Ongoing revival of working class struggle
(Silver 2013)
‘[T]hese actions might be a first step in a process
that transforms today’s precarious workers into
tomorrow’s stable working class’ (Silver 2013, p. 63)

12. Strategic priorities
 Trade union education
 Political economy emphasis
 Cooperative alternative

13. Cooperative organising
Aims ‘to facilitate a multi-directional, interactive relationship among leaders,
local officials, activists and ordinary members . . . If it is impossible to involve
and empower workers within their own trade unions, it is scarcely plausible to
suggest that work itself can be democratized, and the legitimacy of unions as
a voice for democratization is itself undermined’ (Gumbrell-McCormick and
Hyman 2019, p. 104, 105)