Calls for the social partners to invoke the spirit of 1987 are understandable, but a lot has changed since, writes Padraig Yeates.
IN 1987 the government was about to run out of funds to make social welfare payments. Unions had only to look at Thatcher's Britain to see what lay in store if a new right-wing political consensus prevailed and business leaders were desperately seeking stability. Charlie Haughey persuaded mandarins, unions and employers alike that a return to centralised pay bargaining was the only game in town.
The gamble paid off. Today our gross national debt ratio is half the EU average, unemployment and inflation are a quarter of the real levels in the 1980s, interest rates are a third of what they were then and taxes have been slashed. The problem is that personal debt levels for many workers, especially young home makers with mortgages, are multiples of what they were in the 1980s. Interest rates are rising, while the prices of basic items such as food and heating soar, and tax cuts in return for pay restraint are no longer an option.
The natures of the key social partners, unions and employers have also changed. There are more workers organised in trade unions than ever before, but union density in the private sector has fallen. This is partly because unions have been slow to supplement their traditional service model, based on meeting the needs of members in a fairly stable labour market, with the campaigning and organising activities required in a more dynamic and increasingly volatile economy.
But the main reason has been a deliberate policy by many employers, large and small, foreign and indigenous, to discourage employees from joining unions. Prof John Geary of UCD, in the only independent national survey to date, found that more than 70 per cent of workers would join a union if their boss approved.
If a pay freeze is a deal breaker for unions in the current economic climate, employers appear equally resistant to conceding collective bargaining as a right to employees, although it exists in almost every other EU member state. The balance among employers appears to be shifting increasingly in favour of this hard-line position.
Unfortunately the "national interest" counts for little when increasingly mobile and unregulated global finance capital turns investment into a lottery. Profit is taken on a short-term basis and many investors cut and run when the bet turns sour. Unions, like social consensus, are seen as a handicap. Long-term sustainability, with the concomitant investment needed in people, plant and R&D, is no longer on the agenda of some employers.
Recent attempts to facilitate collective bargaining through social partnership were scuttled by Ryanair when it successfully defended its right not to concede de facto recognition to Impact pilots in the Supreme Court last year. Some employers are now challenging voluntarist forms of collective bargaining which served the social partners well for decades. Hoteliers threatened a legal challenge to Employment Rights Orders earlier this year and last month a group of electrical contractors obtained an injunction against the implementation of the Registered Employment Agreement for the industry.
The Government could resolve the problem if it had the will. It is a signatory to the UN Declaration of Human Rights and International Labour Organisation conventions 87 and 98, which all guarantee the right of workers to organise and seek representation with employers.
Far from showing any desire to do so, Brian Cowen refused to give a commitment to implement article 28 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, which would have achieved the same objective, during the Lisbon referendum. This move prevented Siptu, the country's largest union, from recommending a Yes vote and confirmed two large private sector unions, the TEEU and Unite, in opposition to the treaty.
Cowen's commitments to the farming lobby in the week before the referendum underlined the message that workplace rights were low on the Government's agenda. It was a far cry from 1987, when Haughey and his protege Bertie Ahern spent months in opposition establishing the basis for a common strategic approach to a crisis that brought unions on board for the Programme for National Recovery.
Their successor has played safe and kicked the collective bargaining issue into the social partnership process. Despite the economic downturn and hardening attitudes of some employers, partnership still has great strengths as a problem solving and conflict resolution mechanism. As with any partnership entering hard times, this one needs reinforcing. Instead one of the partners is progressively closing the door on the other.
Haughey was an unlikely matchmaker but he conjured up respect, born out of the mutual desperation of the prospective partners. The question is, can Cowen revive that relationship in less desperate times when workers are hurting far more than employers?
• Padraig Yeates is co-author of Saving the Futurewith Tim Hastings and Brian Sheehan. He is a journalist and acts as media adviser to a number of unions, including Siptu and the TEEU