THE news that the State's 27,500 nurses are set to march on the Dail, if their strike goes ahead next month, is simply the most dramatic flourish so far in a dispute that is set to unhinge public-service pay. Yet it would be wrong to attribute all the blame to the nurses, unreasonable as they appear to many, in rejecting the latest £100 million Labour Court settlement.

The fact that CIE workers are also set for a heave against Partnership 2000 shows that the present malaise has also spread to the semi-States. In fact a new survey of over 2,000 workers in the private sector, carried out by the University of Limerick, shows widespread disillusion there with national agreements. Some 69 per cent felt they had not given workers "a fair share" of economic growth.

It may well be that the current generation of national agreements has reached the end of its natural life. A similar thing happened in 1981 when a decade of centralised pay bargaining broke down.

The difference then was that the economy was ailing and it was employers who most wanted to kick free from the constraints of national pay awards.

Today it is the workers who feel, with some justification, that pay deals since the start of the 1990s have consistently underestimated the rate of growth in the economy. The fact that it is the nurses - who have been offered increases worth nearly 23 per cent over the past two years - who are showing the greatest militancy indicates just how deep the disillusionment has become.

While national agreements, since they were reintroduced in 1987, have blossomed into wide-branched trees that now encompass all sorts of measures to tackle social exclusion, the trunk of centralised pay deals is rotten. It is based on rigid relativities that no longer reflect the realities of the workplace.

In the public service there has not even been room for the type of "gain-sharing" that has allowed many private-sector workers to earn substantially more than the pay norms. The "restructuring" deals allowed for in the Programme for Competitiveness and Work have degenerated into a protracted round of "specials" with every group watching everyone else.

Any successor to Partnership 2000 will have to be radically different, especially in the public service. Last Monday senior public-service trade union leaders were given Government proposals for a new system of pay bargaining that would be much more orientated towards rewarding individual and team productivity. It was, in short, a blueprint for smashing the chains of "relativities".

HOWEVER, little discussion on the proposals took place at the meeting of ICTU's public-services committee on Wednesday. This may have been partly because there weren't enough copies to go round but it was also because most of the time was taken up with union leaders speculating on the shape of things to come after the nurses' strike. Most of them wished the nurses well but added the caveat that whatever the nurses finally secured would be the basis for further claims by their own members.

The nurses, of course, claim they are a special case, and it is not just rhetoric. They feel very deeply that their job has changed. It has been transformed from doctor's handmaiden to quasi-medic in some areas.

More fundamental still has been the change within nurses themselves. Today's nurses are the first generation who are there for the long haul, for whom nursing is a career rather than a vocation or a stop-gap between between school and marriage.

They firmly believe that nursing would be far better paid if it had not traditionally been "woman's work". Many other women can identify with that belief. The nurses' trade union leaders make no secret of the fact that their members are trying to "reposition" themselves in the industrial-relations pecking order.

Such repositioning is practically impossible without a free labour market.

The workplace is changing. In a free market DART drivers could well find themselves out of a job, because the trains can be automated. In a free market highly trained professionals in labour-intensive sectors, such as nurses or gardai, could become the new industrial elite. On the other hand, if the "winning formula" of social partnership is lost, the economy may not be able to afford to employ very many nurses or gardai.

It is quite possible that Partnership 2000 will not survive the nurses' strike and that different groups of workers within, and without, the public service will strive to reposition themselves in a new "free for all".

That is what makes the next few week so critical, not just for nurses but everyone living in the Republic.