I have just spent three months in Government Buildings working through the partnership process. We have produced a possible agreement which will go to our members for their judgment on what we did and how well we did it. Have we produced a mechanism which makes prosperity and fairness compatible?
We had an agenda which went far beyond narrow pay bargaining. We understood that to make a real increase in the income and living standards of our members we had to make the connections between pay, taxation, social welfare and the shape of their lives at work and at home. We also argued that pay increases should be strongly targeted in favour of the low-paid and for an immediate increase in the minimum wage to tackle the social exclusion of the working poor.
This agenda has achieved real results. Changes in taxation, social welfare and child benefit, together with the overall pay increase, will increase living standards and make a real difference particularly for the working poor. We have set the shape of new relationships in the workplace with frameworks for lifelong learning, family-friendly policies, equality, and support for the development of workplace partnerships.
We have secured a 25 per cent increase in living standards for all workers and a very real hike in the take-home pay of many thousands, mostly women, who are currently paid well below the proposed minimum wage rate. Most had no expectation that this process would deliver to them at all.
We have set the shape of a new relationship between work and home by ensuring that allocation of resources in education, health, housing, transport and other public expenditure will materially help our members' lives. We have targeted these commitments and that influence to those who need it the most.
As a trade union movement, we supported the community and voluntary groups who directly represented the socially excluded in this process.
They believe they have significantly reshaped the allocation of resources in the context of need and rights. They believe they are now part of a process which has the potential for transforming economic and social relationships. This judgment is rooted in the struggle it took to make their demands heard and the understanding that it will take struggle to make the agreement real in the lives of those who need it.
If we are in the business of creating just relationships, the real test is how well we have fulfilled our own responsibilities for the weak and the vulnerable. In collective bargaining terms, there has been some progress, but not enough. That, unfortunately, is the history of traditional collective bargaining in relation to the powerless.
The pay offer and delay in increasing the minimum wage has not met the expectations of many unions representing the low-paid, particularly in the private sector, who believe the employers' response is a step "too mean". The employers' reluctance to readily agree to paid trade union leave for union representatives looking after their members, financial support for workers undertaking education and training and fair parental and maternity leave conditions, has reinforced this feeling.
It is a narrow and unacceptable definition of competitiveness to argue that behind the drama of the Celtic Tiger, the economy should be sustained by low wages and conditions which do not reflect the need for a flexible, highly trained and motivated workforce.
The challenge is whether the partnership process can really begin to tackle this definition. Its success will not just be measured by an increase in living standards for all but whether it reduces the growing gap between the rich and poor.
Success will also be measured by whether the commitments to "equality of opportunity and access to social, economic and cultural rights and obligations will underpin the ability to participate at work and in the community", are turned into living reality.
To make this happen the powerful have to change how they do business and the powerless have to feel that they have the right to participate in a dialogue of equals. If prosperity and fairness are really to go hand in hand then the partnership process will be the site of many such struggles to get that change.
Our members will now make their own judgment as to whether this process offers that opportunity.
Inez McCormack is president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions