There’s a bronze plaque in the ground outside the Dunnes Stores on Henry Street celebrating the Dunnes Stores workers who went on strike in 1984, boycotting South African produce during apartheid.
It’s the Henry Street story that historian Mary Muldowney returns to again and again, she said on Saturday.
To many, it is now almost fable.
How Mary Manning, a 21-year old cashier, refused to ring through a grapefruit sourced in apartheid South Africa, says Muldowney, sitting in Ann’s Bakery around 200 metres from Dunnes Stores.
The Dunnes strikers were 10 very ordinary working-class people, says Muldowney, who didn’t know much about South Africa. “Except that they were instructed by their union not to handle South African goods because of the worldwide boycott movement against apartheid.”
The workers spent three years on strike, met Nelson Mandela in 1990 – and through their protest helped push Ireland to become the first Western country to totally boycott South African produce.
“They are rightly known all over the world,” says Muldowney, “it is trade unionism at its absolute best.”
But there are lesser-known stories of protest by Henry Street’s female retail workers too, says Muldowney, who in her role as a Dublin City Council historian-in-residence has tracked the history of women workers on Henry Street from 1790 to 2000.
And, she says, as well as older stories of rising up and winning rights, more recent stories of decline and precarity.
The gradual arrival of women workers
Today Henry Street is mostly shops, with big fashion chains like River Island, Next and Zara, health food stores and pharmacies, the department store Arnotts, phone shops and Dunnes Stores.
But in the late 18th century, it was a mix of shops, cafes, restaurants, jewellers, dressmakers, tailors and homes, says Muldowney.
At that time, most retail workers were men. Some women worked in dressmaking but weren’t seen on the shop floor.
That changed in the 1840s, when Le Bon Marché in Paris opened, she says, heralding the arrival of department stores.
Arnotts opened on Henry Street in 1845, says Muldowney. Despite the Famine, the business was a major success – thanks to the trams that had started to run from the suburbs into the city centre, she says.
Department stores differed from other shops as they displayed prices on all their items, says Muldowney. They also delivered and they accepted returns, she said. “That made shopping much more into the leisure activity it is today.”
Big department stores like Arnotts and Clery’s – which was then called McSwiney, Delaney & Co – also also had lingerie sections, so needed female staff.
“By the end of the 19th century there was a whole different look to who was serving,” says Muldowney.
Women could get jobs but the conditions were terrible. Long working hours and much lower wages than men, she says. “The average working week in 1900 was 54 hours but this could often be extended to as long as 120 hours.”
The shops operated the “living-in system, meaning that all shop assistants had to live on the premises”. In many cases “they were literally locked in at night”, she says.
That made it harder for workers to steal. After all, they rarely left the shop. “The idea was to make sure they wouldn’t bring in friends,” she says. “There was an assumption that working-class people couldn’t be trusted.”
In 1894, Arnotts burnt to the ground, says Muldowney. The staff all survived, she says, but “people were entirely out of work and every single one of their possessions were burned with the store”.
Irish independence didn’t bring major improvements in workers’ conditions, says Muldowney. “Nobody seemed to sit down and work out a programme.”
In 1945, women laundry workers went on strike for three months to get a second week of annual leave, says Muldowney, which they won for all workers.
“In the middle decades of the century, membership of trade unions grew, reaching a peak in the 1980s,” she says.
At that time many large retailers employed full-time staff directly, she says, which meant security, workers’ rights and pensions. “Clery’s would have been considered decent jobs before it closed,” says Muldowney.
But the 1990s saw the first shift backwards for retail workers’ conditions, towards precarious employment and low pay, she says.
“The fact that they would now be paid comparatively less than they would have been in the latter part of the last century is worrying,” says Muldowney, when wages are compared to the cost of living.
It seems like after decades of progress, the conditions of retail workers are in decline, she says.
Dave Gibney, communications officer with Mandate trade union, says that terms and conditions of retail workers have been in decline since the 1990s. And especially since 2010, he said.
These days, most retail workers are on part-time variable contracts so if they try to organise, they can easily be punished with fewer hours, says Gibney.
Before 2010, there were Joint Labour Committees, which agreed ratios of part-time to full-time staff, he says. It might be that two-thirds of contracts for grocery retailers had to be full-time contracts and one-third could be part time, says Gibney.
“All employers had to abide by that,” he said. But that later changed, he says, leading to a freefall.
Some large retailers don’t give out any full-time contracts now, says Gibney.
There is a European Union part-time workers directive, he says, which should be binding, but the Irish government has never implemented it.
That directive stipulates that if a worker is a part-time worker and someone else leaves, the remaining part-time worker can seek to take on those hours, he says.
Dunnes Stores tried to bring in zero-hours contracts in 1995 and 1996, he says, which workers resisted. But then they brought in 15 hours-a-week contracts instead, he said.
In Arnott’s and beyond
At 12 Henry Street – a grand red brick building with big windows displays and flags flying – is the Arnott’s building.
In 1918, shop worker, union organiser and suffragette Cissie Cahalan led a three-day strike at the department store for better conditions and union recognition.
Other grades of workers walked out in sympathy and the strike was a success, she says. “She’s not as well known, she should be.”
Cahalan was a leader in the Irish Distributive and Administrative Union (IDATU), which had campaigned to end the “living-in system”– which was scrapped in 1912.
“There weren’t many working-class women who were suffragettes,” says Muldowney.
At 21 Henry Street – today a health store – shop owner and restaurateur Jennie Wyse Power ran the Irish Farm Produce Company.
Wyse Power, a member of Cumann na mBán, regularly hosted nationalist meetings. The Proclamation of the Republic was signed above her shop, says Muldowney.
Muldowney’s research stops in 2000, so it doesn’t include the recent Debenhams protests.
Of all the actions on the street though, Muldowney says, it is still the anti-apartheid strikes that stand out for her – because they were completely selfless.
Manning, according to her own writing, was not politically active before she went on strike, says Muldowney.
Striker Karen Gearon was the shop steward who called a walkout. Most of their colleagues walked out on the day but went back soon after, says Muldowney.
Ten workers, mostly women, remained on strike for three years, taking a major hit to their own wages for a cause that didn’t affect them directly.
“It’s kind of amazing that so many people would be afraid to take on the South African government,” says Muldowney.
Their actions contributed to an Irish government decision to become the first Western government to fully ban the import of South African goods in 1987, a ban that lasted until apartheid was abolished.