Esther Lynch is the General Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). The first Irish General Secretary of the ETUC, she 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.