Trade unions must adapt to meet the needs of young people in order to survive, the head of the organisation representing university teachers has said., general secretary of the Irish Federation of University Teachers , told its annual conference at the weekend that young people had grown up largely in the generation where union membership was “simply not the norm”.
“OECD figures suggest Ireland’s union membership figures dropped to between 23 per cent and 27 per cent in 2016, depending on the data used, from 36 per cent in 2010. Ms Donegan said IFUT’s membership continued to grow. She said one reason for this was that the organisation gave priority to focusing on the issue of precarious employment in higher education.
“The key is to focus on those workers whose very marginalisation keeps them out of union membership. Information is so poor that we do not even know how many staff are precariously employed in our universities.She said trade unions must speak and “more importantly, listen to these workers in their language, not in the often very, very staid language of the branch committee meeting or minutes”.