This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Terry Clavin. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 22 January 1931, Ireland
Died: 26 September 2010
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
Owens, Evelyn (1931–2010), trade unionist and women’s rights advocate, was born on 22 January 1931 at 23 Vernon Gardens, Clontarf, Dublin, the fourth of six children of William Owens, a civil servant of Clontarf, originally from Co. Roscommon, and his wife Ellen (née Monaghan), from Co. Galway. The family lived in Limerick for four years before returning in 1938 to Clontarf where Evelyn lived for the rest of her life in the family home at Vernon Gardens. A good student, she was educated in the local Holy Faith Convent. On finishing school in 1948, she successfully sat the Dublin Corporation entrance exams and began working as a clerical officer in the treasurer’s department. She later obtained a night-course diploma in public administration from TCD.
Coming from a well-to-do background, she was initially uninterested in trade union activities and devoted her spare time to socialising and sports, gaining selection for the Leinster women’s hockey team. Becoming active in the Irish Local Government Officials’ Union (ILGOU) (c.1959), she was among a group of women local government officials infuriated by their union’s decision in 1963 to accept a clerical officer pay award that introduced salary discrimination between men and women. (The local government service was then one of only three bodies in Ireland to provide equal pay for women.) After the award was confirmed in November by an ILGOU ballot that split along gender lines, the female dissidents established the Association of Women Officers of the Local Authorities of Ireland, with Owens as the chairwoman.
The association soon had 146 members and sought a high court injunction restraining the ILGOU from accepting the award. An impasse ensued until management agreed in 1964 to pay the male salary scale to all women. Married workers received a higher scale, which perpetuated the discrimination, as women working in the public sector, primary-school teachers excepted, were obliged to resign upon marriage. Nonetheless, this little-known incident represented the first meaningful assertion of women’s rights in Ireland since the 1930s, and Owens’s ongoing campaign for equal pay for women provided a focus for the small but vigorous feminist movement that emerged in the early 1970s.
Although the association of women officers lapsed, a politicised Owens emerged as a radicalising influence within the ILGOU. Challenging the traditional deference associated with public service trade unionism, she drove female recruitment, encouraged closer relations with the blue-collar unions, and fought for neglected and overwhelmingly female grades such as clerk typists. Her efforts impressed ILGOU members, who elected her their vice-president (1964–7) and president (1967–9), making her the first woman president of an Irish trade union representing both sexes.
She was also active within the wider trade union movement as a member of ICTU’s women’s advisory council, serving as its chairwoman (1968–71). Frustrated by ICTU’s token support for equal pay, she admitted that women did not help their cause by largely shunning trade union activism. Along with fellow local government officer Helen Burke, she founded in 1967 the Association of Women Citizens, which sought equality of pay and employment opportunities for women. A vocal organisation, it accumulated 1,000 members, but failed to attract support from women factory workers who tended to believe that equal pay threatened their jobs.
Within months of joining the Labour party, Owens was elected to Seanad Éireann in 1969 on the labour panel, and used this platform to press for equality of pay and employment opportunity for women, co-education in the schools, and the rights of abandoned wives, distressed widows and single mothers. Immaculately turned out, Owens won the respect of her overwhelmingly male parliamentary colleagues with her business-like manner and willingness to speak her mind. She retained her job with Dublin Corporation, which allowed time off to attend the sporadic seanad sittings, and was also a member of the Council for the Status of Women in the early 1970s, and chair of the Labour party’s women’s national council from 1975.
While she was very much on the liberal wing of Labour, her respect for party discipline meant she was overshadowed by more outspoken feminists, such as her seanad contemporary and ally Mary Robinson (elected as an independent). Distancing herself from the controversial activities of the Irish women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s, Owens rooted her arguments on behalf of women more in class terms, and avoided unnecessarily provoking conservatives. (In 1998 she noted that feminism had accomplished little for women as workers and effectively obliged them to combine their careers with largely unsupported child-rearing.)
Upon reelection to the seanad for the labour panel in 1973, she was appointed the first woman leas cathaoirleach by the new Fine Gael–Labour coalition government, and for the next four years regularly presided over seanad business during the absences abroad of the cathaoirleach, James Dooge. As a member of the presidential commission, she became the first woman to sign an Irish bill into law (1974).
Under pressure from the European Commission, the 1973–7 coalition government ended the most blatant forms of pay and employment discrimination against women. In early 1976, Owens was prominent in protests when the government tried unsuccessfully to postpone implementing its equal pay legislation. Just before the coalition left office in 1977, she adroitly pushed legislation through the seanad outlawing employment discrimination on the grounds of sex and marital status. Handicapped by her distaste for the tedious and gruelling election process, which involved travelling all over the country to canvass local councillors, she surprisingly lost her seat in the 1977 seanad elections.
Subsequently achieving a management position in Dublin Corporation with responsibility for labour relations, she continued as a resolute trade union representative of Corporation workers and as a Labour activist, serving for a time on the party’s national executive and being closely associated with Frank Cluskey, the party leader from 1977 to 1981. Her former membership of the oireachtas conferred access to the dáil bar and the political heavyweights therein, which paid off in 1984 when Minister for Labour Ruairí Quinn, a Labour party colleague, made her vice-chairwoman of the Labour Court.
This appointment facilitated Owens’s promotion of women’s rights; although primarily an industrial relations tribunal, the court also had the power to make legally binding decisions on matters such as employment equality. Her influence was soon apparent, as the court made a landmark ruling in a 1985 constructive dismissal case, which established the right to freedom from sexual harassment in the workplace. Much of the case law subsequently developed by the Labour Court regarding gender discrimination and sexual harassment was incorporated into equality legislation passed by the oireachtas in 1998.
At the behest of ICTU, Quinn, now minister for enterprise and employment, promoted her chairwoman of the Labour Court in 1994. Quickly embroiled in a series of high-profile industrial disputes, she handled the media skilfully and was praised for her ability to recast the existing elements of a dispute into a mutually acceptable compromise. Conversely, her successor implicitly criticised her for neglecting considerations of financial sustainability to achieve settlements.
Inheriting an uneasy institutional relationship with the Labour Relations Commission (LRC), which had taken over the Labour Court’s conciliation duties in 1991, Owen acknowledged differences did arise, while maintaining they were much exaggerated. In 1996 she rejected the LRC’s suggestion that Labour Court recommendations be made binding, arguing that it was incompatible with the prevailing system of voluntary collective bargaining. The intractability of certain disputes, especially those concerning state companies, led employers and unions to reject or disregard Labour Court recommendations and revert back to the LRC’s conciliation service. This ‘revolving door’ approach undermined the Labour Court’s status as the court of last resort and persisted throughout her tenure as chairwoman.
Amid a booming economy and intense pressure within the public sector for wage increases, Owens’s timely intervention and brokering of a generous pay award in spring 1997 averted what would have been the first national nurses’ strike. Although her recommendation strove to isolate the nurses as a special case, the government’s pay policy unravelled thereafter, as assorted health-sector unions representing workers with traditional pay linkages to the nurses jumped the queue and gained prompt access to the LRC and Labour Court in pursuit of their claims, much to the disgruntlement of other unions.
Equality and sexual harassment cases increasingly preoccupied the court, which in late 1997 made its largest equality pay award when it awarded four women employees of the Irish Aviation Authority €100,000 each in back pay after determining that two men had been paid more for doing the same work. This ruling struck at the public-sector practice of allowing redeployed male technical staff to retain their existing salaries by assigning them nominal supervisory responsibilities over predominately female clerical workers.
Owens also chaired the National Minimum Wage Commission (1997–8), which paved the way for the introduction of a minimum wage in 2001, and the committee that established the National Centre for Partnership and Performance (1997–2001). After retiring from the Labour Court in 1998, she was an honorary member of the boards of Beaumont Hospital and the Irish Medical Council. She died on 26 September 2010 in St Colmcille’s Hospital, Loughlinstown, Co. Dublin, and was cremated at Glasnvein cemetery. She never married. Her will disposed of an estate worth €1.4 million.