In the past, joining a union after you had signed a contract of employment with a big tech company was rarely, if ever, an automatic reflex.

The idea must have felt faintly old-fashioned, irrelevant even. These were places where in-office perks were framed as a form of care – while handily doubling as a mode of entrenching people at work; if you didn’t need to pick up your dry-cleaning, you could stay longer, or so the thinking went. Salaries were high and company loyalty was tribal. Employee resource groups, often structured around workers’ identities, were all about “building community” in-house. Who needs a union?

But this is going to change. It will have to change, because lay-offs rather than job growth are now the sector’s reality.

Last week’s headline figure of 350 people losing their jobs at Meta in Dublin is notable for a number of reasons. For one, it’s around 20 per cent of Meta’s staff here, double the overall percentage Meta is shedding globally. This may indicate that Meta jobs in Ireland are more vulnerable than Meta jobs elsewhere, or that Meta over-hired in Ireland. Either way, it’s a problem.

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The other reason it’s notable is because it’s not the real figure. The real figure of recent Irish........

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