Very predictably, following the SIPTU vote of 400 to 1 that partnership talks be deferred, the ICTU has followed suit. Equally predictably, Bertie Ahern says he is happy to engage with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions on concerns the union movement has in advance of a new pay round. The choreography of this whole thing is going to get mighty tedious. Union leaders may well be aware that partnership has become bloated and cumbersome but they have no vision of an alternative strategy. Ahern's willingness to assuage union concerns stems from his role as the 'Great Concilliator" back in the 1980s when he was Minister for Labour. As one commentator in the Irish Independent put it this morning " national pay deals are embedded deep in his political DNA".
That same piece was a rather overcooked polemic about how partnership has outlived its usefulness and how SIPTU's decision gives us an opportunity to call a halt to the nonsense partnership has become once and for all. While the article attacks partnership as "a kind of watered down vocationalism, an ideology which had its first outing in Mussolini's fascist Italy during the 1930s", the real target is the public sector:
Under so-called social partnership public sector workers have further widened the pay gap between them and their private sector counterparts. Average public sector pay is now running at €820 a week compared to just €641 a week in distribution and services, and just €577 in industry. Public service wages are also rising much faster than those in the private sector. While industrial wages are rising by an average of just 2.7pc a year and services wages are growing by 3.1pc public sector wages are racing ahead by 6.2pc, more than twice the rate in most of the private of the private sector.
There's a lot of distortion of the true picture here but what can't be gainsaid is the fact that most of the 750,000 new jobs created in the last dozen years have been in the multi-national or indigenous services sector where the trade unions have barely registered an impact.
Our economy is a curious mix of elements of the European social model with its blend of corporatism and welfarism and what might loosely be termed a US-type neo-liberalism, which is manifested in a high dependence on inward investment by the multi-national sectors. Our polemicist in the Indo is more or less right when he says that "strip out the public sector and traditional indigenous manufacturing and trade unions don't feature in the modern Irish labour market".
Fianna Fáil at the weekend signalled their clear intention to put public sector reform very prominently in their election campaign. Senior ministers indicated that Benchmarking would only follow commitments towards real reform. So not only do unions largely not feature in much of the private sector, they are likely to be put on the defensive in the public sector as well. Is there any sign at all that Union leaders have a plan to deal with this other than scurry back to the top table of partnership - after a decent show of reluctance of course?
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