SIPTU presents itself as the largest force for organised labour in Ireland. Its scale is cited as proof of strength, of presence, of the collective weight of workers. Yet for many members, especially those in small and medium workplaces, the reality of SIPTU representation is starkly different. Instead of strength, what they encounter is a union that chooses weakness. It treats confrontation as an inconvenience and protection as optional.
I write this as a SIPTU member of nearly five years who recently went through a redundancy process. When I contacted SIPTU for support, expecting the union to engage my employer during consultations, I was told it was “silly” even to imagine that a representative would attend such meetings for a company of that size. The official was far more concerned with whether my membership fees were up to date than with the substance of my case. The message was unambiguous: administration mattered and representation did not.
From the union’s perspective, the redundancy was already a foregone conclusion. I was told that the “redundancy bell cannot be unrung” and that I should accept whatever package the employer offered. No attempt was made to challenge management, no questions were raised about process, and no alternative proposals were prepared. The union’s advice was not to organise, not to resist, and not even to negotiate. It was simply to comply.
I ultimately secured a strong settlement, but I did so alone. The union played no part in shaping the outcome. Its absence was not accidental. It was a decision.
The pattern continued after the redundancy ended. Now unemployed and searching for ways to rebuild, I contacted my SIPTU representative again to ask what support might be available in terms of upskilling or training. I was told these services are available only to full members in employment. As someone newly out of work, I was effectively excluded. Instead of offering guidance or even solidarity, the official suggested that I might consider cancelling my membership altogether. The union that would not stand beside me during redundancy now saw little reason to remain involved once the job was gone.
This experience is not exceptional. It reveals something fundamental about the union’s priorities. SIPTU is present when administration requires it and absent when struggle demands it. Small and medium workplaces are fragmented, harder to organise, and less attractive than high-profile public sector disputes. They require patient groundwork rather than set-piece battles. Faced with these conditions, the union often defaults to passivity. Cases that present legal ambiguity or collective leverage draw attention. Cases where the employer has followed statutory procedures are quietly deprioritised, regardless of the worker’s vulnerability.
In these workplaces, SIPTU’s strength is theoretical. Its weakness is lived.
When a union representative tells a member that attending consultations is unrealistic, they are admitting that the union accepts its own irrelevance in that terrain. When they emphasise subscription payments but dismiss representation as fanciful, they expose an organisation more comfortable running as a service bureaucracy than as a fighting structure. When they advise a redundant worker to consider cancelling their membership rather than offering any support, they signal that solidarity is conditional and temporary.
A union that tells workers to take whatever deal they are given is not neutral. It becomes part of the machinery that makes such deals inevitable.
This is the political cost of the service model of unionism. Members are encouraged to imagine that protection flows automatically from membership. But when the moment of crisis arrives, the protection evaporates while the subscription reminder does not. The union teaches workers to lower their expectations. Not of employers, but of the union itself.
And when workers learn to expect nothing, they act accordingly. They disengage. They negotiate alone. They conclude that collective representation is symbolic rather than material.
For the labour movement, this is the real danger. Not that SIPTU fails in individual cases, but that it quietly normalises failure in entire sectors of the economy. The union remains numerically large but strategically timid, present on paper but absent in practice, especially where bosses are small enough to escape public scrutiny yet powerful enough to threaten individual livelihoods.
Criticism of this tendency is not an attack on unions. It is a defence of their purpose. A union that cannot stand up to a medium-sized employer cannot credibly claim to be preparing workers for larger confrontations. A union that tells members to accept the inevitable is not mobilising collective strength. It is administering defeat.
Institutions can recover. They can rediscover their purpose. But only if their failings are named plainly. A union that teaches workers to expect less of it will, in time, find workers expecting nothing at all. And once members adopt that expectation, rebuilding trust becomes a political task far greater than any redundancy case.
