Opportunities for growth in developing tech sectors, says banking union

Amid an ever increasing blurring of the lines between the tech and financial sectors, the Financial Services Union (FSU) has said it will strive to make itself more relevant to a new generation of young workers and explore new areas in which to recruit.

Ahead of the launch of its new three year strategic plan by Minister for Finance Michael McGrath, the union’s general secretary, John O’Connell says the union sees the forthcoming transposition of the EU Directive on collective bargaining and prospect of legislation requiring good faith engagement by employers as a major opportunity to renew the organisation

The union, formerly the Irish Bank Officials Association, has endured a significant decline in membership over the past decade and a half from a high of around 25,000 to roughly 10,000 today but has enjoyed some recent success in its efforts to organise in sectors like tech and electronic game design which it does under the banner Game Workers Unite Ireland.

Now Mr O’Connell believes there is scope for it to build on its experience on range of issues it has been engaged with recently – the likes of working from home and visas – to extend its reach into tech and other, related sectors.

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“Retail Banking is shrinking, that’s the reality,” he says. “And digitalisation and now AI will have further impacts there as well as we go forward so it’s logical for us to look at that broader lens in terms of organising workers because the kind of clear delineation people between sectors is not as clear now as it used to before you had to ask yourself if Google was a search engine or a payments company.”

At present, the union represents a little over 1,000 members in around 30 tech companies, numbers boosted by the unexpected post pandemic wave of redundancies among some of the sector’s biggest names.

While stepping into to advise workers seeking support or legal representation at a time when their employment is in peril is one thing, however, the FSU may well face a challenge to retain them never mind grow numbers when the crisis passes and workers with no tradition of union involvement in firms with little inclination towards union engagement weigh up whether to continue to paying dues.

“I think we share those concerns in terms of what’s going to happen next,” he says. “So, we have done a lot of work, engagement work, training work to ensure longevity and at the same time I think a lot of the people in those companies are seeing that that round of redundancies was not just the once off they were told it was going to be.

“People were given certain assurances that it was just a correction, something to address over-hiring but that doesn’t seem to have been the case. We’ve already seen big companies come back look for more cuts so there is a credibility issue there.”

That, the union believes, presents an opportunity at a time when the EU Directive on collective bargaining will oblige Government to create a framework within which progress can be made towards an 80 per cent level of coverage.

Many companies in fintech may see themselves as being among the remaining 20 per cent but Mr O’Connell is confident there will be significant opportunities to expand the union’s membership and influence as the Directive along with changes on “good faith engagement” as recommended by the high level group established by the Department of Enterprise, start to impact on the current environment.

He says it is hard to be sure exactly how these changes will be legislated for but that they look certain to impact the landscape, positively from the union’s perspective.

“It’s not easy to organise workers at present,” he says. “And while it is not entirely clearly what setting a percentage target for collective bargaining will mean or how strong the good faith engagement will be or how easy all of this will be for unions or workers to navigate, these will be positive developments and we want to ensure we are as well placed as possible to build on them.

“There are other changes we would like to see too. In the game sector, where we already have quite a footprint, and where a number of employers have signed up to paying a living wage, we would like to see the availability of tax breaks linked to being a good and responsible employer.”

There is certainly potential for expansion in the sector, he believes.

In the meantime, the union must, he says, look after its current core membership, a group further reduced in recent times by the exit from the Irish market of KBC and Ulster banks but still a huge portion of the union’s present makeup.

“We still see ourselves as being at the heart of a much changed banking sector,” he says, citing the union’s work on issues like, basic pay and conditions, remote and flexible working and its support for workers looking to reskill.

As branch networks continue to shrink, though, the union is, like the companies that run them and once employed almost all of its members, having to look at doing things very differently in order to survive.