The struggle for Waterford Crystal: a workers’ story of the rise and fall(out) of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger

Lalor, Josh (2024) The struggle for Waterford Crystal: a workers’ story of the rise and fall(out) of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger. Doctoral (PhD) thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

[English] PDF - Accepted Version Available under License - The author retains copyright ownership and moral rights in this thesis. Neither the thesis nor substantial extracts from it may be printed or otherwise reproduced without the author's permission. Download (27MB)

Abstract

Established in 1947, Waterford Crystal was considered an iconic Irish brand, worldrenowned as a handcrafted product made on an industrial scale. The company’s success shaped the development of Waterford, Ireland and the surrounding region. Its organized workforce secured good wages, good benefits, a high standard of living, and the opportunity to stay in Ireland during times when poverty, unemployment, and emigration were endemic. In 2009, the company went into receivership and the Waterford Crystal brand and intellectual property rights were sold to US venture capitalists. The workers, most of whom had given twenty to forty years of their lives in service to the company, were out of work with no redundancy pay and a pension fund that was nearly insolvent. During fieldwork in 2011 and 2012, many of the workers were still unemployed, what savings they had were dwindling, and their chances of any relief were hindered by Ireland’s economic austerity measures—a consequence of the 2008 financial crisis. The unemployment rate for Waterford was 25.1%, making it the third worst unemployment spot in Ireland (Taft 2012). Given their circumstances, the workers were inclined to contrast and compare the uncertainty of their current situation with the privileged status they had enjoyed for most of their working lives. The Struggle for Waterford Crystal represents how the workers make sense of their efforts to achieve a certain security, comfort, and pride from their working lives only to have it taken away by political and economic processes beyond their control. The former glass workers offer a unique vantage point upon which to elucidate the ways in which changes in the manifestation of the capitalist system, namely Fordist/Keynesian capitalism and Flexible Accumulation/ Neoliberal capitalism, influence people’s lives across time and space. My ethnography of the Waterford Crystal workforce provides a situated case study of the rise and fall(out) of the Celtic Tiger through the experiences, memories, narratives, and archives of the Waterford Crystal workers. In doing so, my ethnography is as much about the historical, geographical, sociocultural, political, and economic processes associated with the capitalist system as it is about the former glass workers themselves.

Actions (login required)

View Item