Esther Lynch

Esther Lynch is General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).

Esther Lynch – the first Irish General Secretary of the ETUC – first became a union representative when she worked in a micro-chip factory in the 1980s. She went on to work at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions for two decades, where she worked on the negotiation of Ireland’s national pay and social partnership agreements and the union response to the Troika’s attacks on wages and collective bargaining a decade ago. She joined the ETUC in 2015.

Her experience of working for the minimum wage gives her a first-hand knowledge of making ends meet on low wages, and she says she will use that experience to drive forward the ETUC’s demands for pay rises and taxes on excess profits as the only fair way out of the cost-of-living crisis.