Dunnes policy an assault on dignity of working people

Almost exactly 25 years ago, I was talking to the trade union organiser Peter Cassells, then general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions. He was explaining to me how unions thought about the shifts in Irish society and the emergence of provincial towns with their own kind of working class. How did they figure out where they should be looking to organise?

A big part of the answer, he said, was Dunnes Stores. "If you were giving an intelligence report back to headquarters as to the position in a particular town, one of the rules of thumb was: 'Is there a Dunnes Stores there?' "

“That gave you an indication that there was a sufficient number of working people with an income in that town that Dunnes felt it worthwhile to put a shop there. In a sense, they were doing the market research for us. That would be a sign that that was a town that should be serviced by us as well, in terms of running shop stewards’ courses or establishing a trades council. And, as a rule of thumb, it has certainly worked for us.”

A presence in our aspirations

It worked in our house too. I grew up in a working-class housing estate in Dublin rather than in a growing provincial town, but Dunnes Stores was a presence not just in our lives but in our aspirations. I don’t mean this in any romantic way, of course. My mother bought food in Dunnes because it was cheap. When we got any money, we bought clothes in Dunnes because they were cheap, sure, but also because they were fashionable.

Dunnes had figured out that working-class people had the same aspirations as other consumers, that they wanted to look good and that looking good made them feel good about themselves, too. While Charles Haughey famously mocked at Dunnes Stores shirts (he preferred Charvet), most of his constituents were glad of them.

In our world, if someone said “That’s a nice dress” or “I like your jumper”, the standard answer was a one-word exclamation: “Dunnes!” A lot was contained in that single syllable. It meant “Yes, thanks, it does look good on me. But don’t think I spent a lot of money on it or that I’m showing off. I was just smart enough to spot it in Dunnes before you did.”

There was a whole ethic here – aspirational but unpretentious, frugal but not puritanical, looking good but not losing the run of yourself. It spoke of a certain self-confidence, of being comfortable enough in your skin to be comfortable enough in a nice but cheap dress. Dunnes somehow managed not just to tap into that ethic but to define it.

Just as the unions were following Dunnes, they were also feeding it. When unions moved into all those growing towns, they helped to create and sustain working families with some degree of security and some money in their pockets.

And who else was going to shop at Dunnes? The solicitor and the doctor and the members of the golf club? Dunnes may have moved upmarket over the years but only to keep pace with the rising aspirations and growing sophistication of ordinary working people. It still depends on the existence of large numbers of people who (a), have enough money to be consumers and (b), are not ashamed, when someone compliments their clothes, to say “Dunnes” rather than a lying “Gucci”.

This is why it is especially stupid for Dunnes to be at war with the very class it helped to create. The culture of the zero-hour contract, which Dunnes has been trying to embed in Ireland, is an assault on all of the things that Dunnes once helped to define. It's about stripping away the collective dignity of working people, a dignity embodied in the rights that their mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers won the hard way over many decades. It's about making workers what they used to be before all those struggles – individual, vulnerable and poor and therefore utterly dependent on the whims of their employers.

As well as being immoral, this feral brand of capitalism is a snake that consumes its own tail. Zero-hour contracts are most prevalent at the bottom end of the economy. And it is people at that end who are the consumers on whom the very businesses that are implementing those contracts depend. They are the “working people with an income” with whom companies like Dunnes used to have a symbiotic relationship. By squeezing their incomes and killing their confidence, Dunnes is squeezing and killing its own future.

It is striking that, in the United States, many of the most exploitative employers – Target, McDonald's, even the notorious Walmart – have been increasing basic wages. Not because they've suddenly had fits of conscience but because they are faced with a stark question – who's going to shop with them if the working poor remain in penury?

Even raw capitalism needs workers who have both resources and aspirations. And even Dunnes needs people who will say “Dunnes!” with pride and confidence rather than shame or anger.