It is time for trade unions to stop seeing the Government as a social partner, writes Kieran Allen
With the battle at Irish Ferries over, social partnership can resume as normal. This is the message from Ibec and some union leaders. Pat Rabbitte has added a less pleasant note - partnership and tougher immigration policies. The dispute, however, has exposed major fault lines which cannot be so easily repaired.
The Irish Continental Group was not a maverick firm but was tied to key networks within the Irish business elite. At no point did Ibec condemn their actions.
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern opposed the "race to the bottom", but his condemnation appeared as genuine as his socialism. The contrast between how his Government responded to requests from workers and from bankers was astounding.
When workers modestly asked for legislation to compel Irish Ferries to behave decently, Bertie became "powerless". But when the Irish Bankers' Federation requested that the Government set aside its own law on compliance statements from company directors, they got a positive "can do" response.
Trade unionists had to walk out from their jobs on December 9th and ship officers had to stage a sit-in before anything was achieved. Yet this is precisely the sort of action which breaches social partnership. When it takes such an explosion of "people power" to get even a threshold of decency, there is something very wrong.
It won't be solved by attacking migrant workers; 100,000 Polish workers cannot be sent back and told to get a work permit. The work-permit system has given employers huge power, because retention of the permit is dependent on their good will. It is far better that migrant workers can move about freely, get unemployment benefit when necessary and gain the confidence to join unions.
In the 19th century thousands of Irish workers were used by British employers to undercut wages. The answer was not to humiliate them further by insisting on work permits, but to draw them into unions.
With or without more work permits, a new social partnership agreement is unlikely to bring improvements. Employers sense that the Celtic Tiger is fading in manufacturing industry and want further reductions in wage costs. (There is, of course, no talk of cuts in profit margins). As well as limiting wage increases, they will undoubtedly look at intensifying work effort and more outsourcing.
Some had hoped that Irish Ferries would set a headline to cow the unions. The majority of employers, however, believe that they can achieve their objectives through the partnership process itself. Such agreements give workers low wage rises in return for employers getting a free hand to introduce "normal ongoing change" at workplace level.
Ninety per cent of Irish workplaces already employ some form of "high-performance work technique". Over the past 18 years most of us have become used to "key performance indicators", "team-working", "appraisals" and a whole battery of measures that go under the rubric of "flexibility".
We also have one of the lowest holiday entitlements in Europe. Stress management has become part and parcel of social partnership.
On top of all this we now face the scourge of outsourcing. Employers may not be able to get away with wage rates of €3.50 an hour, but outsourcing allows them to undercut overtime rates or premium pay for anti-social hours. Sustaining Progress allowed employers to outsource under certain conditions - a new agreement may widen that flexibility still further.
Neither the Central Statistics Office nor the Department of Enterprise Trade and Employment collects comprehensive statistics on "contingent workers" - unlike, for example, the Bureau of Labour Statistics in the US.
But one study conducted for the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions suggested that Ireland had a higher percentage (5.2 per cent) of workers employed on temporary agency contracts than the average (2.2 per cent) for the older EU states. This tendency will almost certainly increase if there is another partnership deal.
Social partnership was supposed to protect us from the worst excesses of Thatcherism, but we have become a model neoliberal economy. Ireland comes fifth in the global "freedom index" of Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank that offers accolades to countries which deregulate their economies.
There are no price controls, no rent controls, no limits on profiteering and a passionate opposition to "burdensome" regulation.
The only significant economic item that is regulated is wages, albeit through an apparently voluntary agreement. This has two major implications.
First, Ireland has become one of the most expensive countries in Europe, with wages only keeping abreast of the official inflation rates.
Bizarrely, these do not include house prices, and many workers have been forced into the rental sector or carry huge levels of debt.
Second, the share of the economy going to wages and social welfare has declined faster in Ireland than elsewhere in the older EU states. Their share of the total economy in the EU fell from 72 per cent in 1987 to 68.3 per cent in 2000.
In Ireland, however, they fell from 71 per cent to 58 per cent.
Supporters of social partnership claim that tax cuts have compensated for the low wage rises. But those sectors of the economy which showed the least restraint have received the greatest tax cuts.
Recently the US publication Tax Notes labelled Ireland the "Bermuda of Europe" because it has such a low tax regime for corporations.
Cutting taxes has had deep consequences for Irish society, particularly for the poor. We have become a First World economy with Third World public services. The reason is that taxes account for only 34 per cent of GNP compared to an EU average of 41 per cent.
Social partnership has also had a corrosive effect on the unions themselves. Union density has fallen, and membership participation is at an all-time low. Instead of blaming migrants, the unions should be running recruitment campaigns. Experience shows they will gain more members when they struggle against rather than appease employers.
Social partnership has also encouraged union leaders to align their demands to the framework of Government policy itself.
Whereas in Britain many unions oppose public-private partnerships, here there is either silence or an endorsement. Instead of a strong campaign for publicly funded creche facilities, there are merely calls for further tax cuts to assist parents. Instead of demanding mandatory pension contributions from employers, there is an endorsement of PRSAs.
Both these approaches favour the better off.
The marches of December 9th showed that there is an appetite for a different sort of trade unionism. Many workers want stronger unions to fight for their interests.
Instead of being addicted to the comforting stability of social partnership, the union leaders should explore new strategies to tackle corporate globalisation.
They can either bargain on a national or a local level, but members should retain the right to make claims when they so wish. Instead of seeing the Government as a partner, the unions should also be forging wider alliances against the growing inequalities. That will mean embracing the new migrant workforce rather than restricting their rights. There is a better way than Blair's or Rabbitte's strategy for stealing the clothes of the right.
Kieran Allen is a lecturer in sociology in UCD and is author of Celtic Tiger: The Myth of Social Partnership