The Irish Congress of Trade Unions gave evidence to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs yesterday on the urgent need for an inclusive and enforceable European charter of fundamental human rights.
We argued for the indivisibility of political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights - i.e. that the right to vote, the right to work, the right to health, the right to education, the right to representation were interdependent.
We argued that the concept of participation is crucial to the practice of rights. We argued that access to and enforceability of such rights for the individual would create core values of social solidarity.
Europe sees a clear linkage between economic growth and social progress. We argued that an effective charter is essential to tackle the current dysfunction between these goals and that we must succeed in both the economic and the social for either to be sustainable.
Today, we are participating in the first review of the social partnership element of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness. Are we making the connections? Do we see the social partnership process as the local site for struggle for the effective practice of such rights as key to tackling the problems of economic growth and fairness?
The immediate debate will undoubtedly be dominated by the agreed need to tackle growing inflation. Our ability to argue that any solutions must be rooted in the integral link between the economic and the social will reflect our commitment to make these connections when the "chips are down".
I have already rehearsed the need to redress the cut in living standards caused by inflation, particularly to those on low and fixed incomes: the need to resource access to labour market on issues such as affordable childcare, paid parental leave and flexible working hours with rights; the need to target investment on health, social and affordable housing, public transport, lifelong learning and other such policy objectives.
If we are arguing that the ability to participate is core to an integrated functioning European Union, then the credibility of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness demands that we measure progress not by process, but by access. That is the language of participation and rights. It requires setting agreed standards with quantifiable and measurable benchmarks for progress towards the goals of access and outcome.
We are therefore rooting social partnership in the context and discipline of the rights of the individual to have a say in the allocation of the resources which affect and shape their lives. Participation is not then a matter of permission from above but a right as a human being.
How it is exercised and practised requires policy-makers to reorganise decision-making processes to enable involvement.
If it is sauce for Europe then it must be sauce for the social partnership process. Otherwise consensus will be posed as an alternative to rights rather than complementary.
Politicians and senior decision-makers are bewildered by the gap between the huge resources allocated for such policies and the achievement of hard outcomes, which impress and change realities. One hears consistently that "we have got the money, the problem is the delivery".
I would argue that it is much deeper than that. Is Government, is business, is the trade union movement prepared to rest and risk the delivery in new forms of governance which require the sharing of power by right?
THERE are straws floating in from the European wind which do not bode well for the understanding that rights are the integral link between economic growth and social inclusion. There is a current ambiguity by the Irish Government as to whether it will support the effective interdependence and enforceability of these rights in the charter. The avowed position of business is that social and economic rights should be aspirational and not enforceable.
More immediate examples of resisting a rights-based approach are reflected by the agreement of business and government to delay existing European provisions to protect and advance part-time workers' rights: Congress had to take the Government to the European Commission to extend the provision on unpaid parental leave.
This does not augur well for the rhetoric in the social partnership programme to be made real through a process of access and rights. Our job is now to argue that this gap between rhetoric and reality must be challenged and changed. If we don't, then we will have allowed a process of consensus to be used to avoid a process of participation based on rights.
Our commitment to narrowing that gap will reveal our own credibility as a movement which means what it says as well as the potential of social partnership to be an innovative, economic and democratic engine of change.
Inez McCormack is president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions