Jack O'Connor, general president of Siptu, believes that in future workers may be more sceptical of economic forecasts by experts given the higher-than-anticipated rises in inflation which have eaten into the pay increases awarded under the current national agreement.
The current deal provided for pay rises of 10 per cent over 27 months. However, in recent times inflation has been hovering around 5 per cent, leading to concerns that there could be an erosion in living standards during the lifetime of the agreement.
Mr O'Connor said people's confidence "in our capacity to predict what is likely to happen has been greatly dented by the experience of the last 12 months" even though forecasts in previous years had not been too far off the mark.
"Now we have the experience of what happened (regarding inflation), people obviously are going to be reluctant to commit to medium-term propositions based on so-called experts," he said.
Mr O'Connor also indicated that there would be an expectation among workers that this concern would be reflected in anything that emerged from any future deal.
Asked whether unions would press for compensatory wage increases in any future deal to offset the impact of inflation on the current agreement, Mr O'Connor said there was still six months to run and that judgments would be made then based on how the figures played out.
"If objective analysis shows there has been erosion of living standards, people will expect that to be addressed. But it may be premature to conclude that the figures would pan out like that," the Siptu general president said.
He said that a future partnership deal had to reconcile the objectives of maintaining competitiveness with enhancing the quality of the working environment and the quality of life for everyone.
Mr O'Connor suggested that social partnership in the future should also deal with issues such as pensions, skill levels and the rights of workers to participate and organise themselves.
