"Don't wait until things get unbearable" – Building the Union in Eclective

The hospitality sector has incredibly low union density. This is for a variety of reasons, including the prevalence of precarious contracts and poor conditions, but also that a lot of the hospitality workforce is made up of immigrants and students. I work in the Stella Cinema in Rathmines, which is one of over twenty four venues owned by Eclective Hospitality groups across Ireland. Despite the high turnover of staff due to the low pay, anti-social hours, and three-hour contracts, we managed to begin organising the workplace after Christmas.

Press Up, now known as Eclective Hospitality Group, is notorious for buying local businesses in Dublin and incorporating them into their monopoly of hospitality venues. The consolidation and expansion of their share of Dublin nightlife has pushed out many other long-standing smaller venues, worsening Dublin’s world-renowned hospitality in the search for higher profits. Press Up was involved in the acquisition of Clery’s on O’Connell Street, which resulted in the loss of jobs for 460 retail workers. The company’s intention was to develop Clery’s into a site of luxury shops, a hotel, and office spaces. We see this scheme across the entirety of Press Up’s ventures - an ideal model for making short-term profit, while making these venues unaffordable to their minimum-wage staff. The Workman’s Club will see a similar takeover over the next year: the development of a high-end bar that further pushes young people out of Dublin’s nightlife.

To give some brief context to organising the Stella and other venues owned by Eclective, I will go through some of the original reasons for workers’ dissatisfaction with their workplace conditions. The original owner of the hospitality group was taken over by a London-based private equity fund called Cheyne Capital in 2024. Cheyne Capital took over Press Up / Eclective on a debt-for-equity basis, meaning that the primary changes for the company would be selective capital investments for certain unprofitable venues, but severe cut-backs for staff. One such attack on the workers’ terms and conditions was the removal of staff-benefit lunches, which were taken away just after Christmas, our busiest period. This cutback made it clear for the staff that the company did not care about them. One Stella worker reported:

“I felt like it was a slippery slope and it was just the first of many things they were planning on changing or taking away. I definitely felt like if we didn’t do something about it, it would only get worse.”

I began suggesting that we organise collective action around this cutback, with the help of the Independent Workers’ Union (IWU). From then we conducted both internal and public petitions demanding that this basic demand be reinstated. Our internal petition was presented by ‘marching on the boss’. This was met with virtually no response, apart from a meeting organised with the head of HR who explained to us that the “cost-of-living crisis” meant these cutbacks were necessary. We explained to him very clearly that the cost-of-living crisis impacts minimum wage workers on three-hour contracts much more than it does a private-equity fund.

The IWU then organised dropping cards into other Eclective venues to see how workers elsewhere were reacting to the attack on workplace conditions. We found a shared anger towards the cutbacks across a number of different venues, with a key location being the Elephant and Castle in Templebar. They had long-term staff who had witnessed all the cutbacks by management over the years. A large majority of the workers there were Brazilian migrants. One member of staff reported:

“We decided to organise because conditions kept getting worse and management wasn’t listening to our concerns. Pay, hours, and respect on the job were constant issues. By coming together in a union, we realised we had the power to stand up for ourselves and fight for fair treatment.”

The staff in Elephant and Castle followed the Stella’s initiative by submitting a collective grievance, also to no response. However, it was at this point that we decided to ballot all IWU members across the Eclective Group for industrial action, which came back overwhelmingly in favour.

Elephant and Castle currently has greater union density than the Stella, and so industrial action is far more likely to be seen there over the coming months. Over the Summer, we have lost many union members in the Stella because of the huge turnover of staff, who need full-time hours that just are not guaranteed by our employer. This presents the immediate issue that new workers are not immediately aware of the attacks on our working conditions, and are less likely to join the union, especially while they are on probationary contracts. This constant turnover of staff is not accidental, but rather facilitates the company’s continuous cut-backs on staff-benefits.

The union will naturally play an important role in us organising around inevitable new cutbacks, but I doubt it will be immediate. Workers will gradually join the union, but what we need to do is create class-consciousness, and allow the staff to come to the correct conclusion themselves; that it is only through joining the union that they can be empowered to take industrial action. We will have to see how things play out in our sister venue Elephant and Castle, and the ways in which their industrial action can inspire and agitate across different venues in Dublin.

A staff member from Elephant and Castle urges:

“Don’t wait until things get unbearable. Talk to your coworkers, share your experiences, and start organising together. Alone it’s hard to make change, but when workers stand united, management has to listen.”

Over 250,000 people across the island work in hospitality, representing a huge portion of the population. Immigrants and young workers keep our pubs, restaurants and hotels running. As young communists, organising within the hospitality industry should play an integral role in our work. This is no easy task, but organising and building class consciousness among workers of all backgrounds is necessary in our goal of building a socialist republic.