The wage element of any successor to Partnership 2000 may be the least critical factor in securing a national agreement, according to Prof Rory O'Donnell of University College Dublin. He made his comments at the Irish Labour History Society Workshop in UCD on Saturday.
Prof O'Donnell has played a leading role in preparing framework documents for the National Economic and Social Council on which past national agreements have been based and he is currently conducting research for the National Centre for Partnership.
In his paper presented to the conference, "Irish Social Partnership: Principles, Institutions and Interpretations", he argued that social partnership in Ireland was increasingly broadly based and pay agreements may no longer be the linchpin of agreements. "The nature and role of social partners is changing in ways that require a new view of what a social partner is now," he said. In the past, social partners were expected to have "a monopoly of representation of a given social group, must have a functional role in the economy [preferably in production] and must be hierarchically organised and concentrated."
However, he said work by bodies such as the National Economic and Social Forum suggested this concept of "peak organisations" was losing "much of its relevance in Ireland". The Government was "now unwilling, or unable, to underwrite the monopoly representation exercised by business associations and trade unions", he said. "National-level partnership arrangements cannot be effective if they are premised on an outdated view of the power, autonomy and effectiveness of central government."