The president of the State's biggest business organisation warned yesterday that social partnership was moving in a direction that could damage competitiveness.

Robin O'Sullivan, president of Chambers Ireland (the umbrella body for chambers of commerce) said that industrial relations were surreptitiously moving from its voluntary model to a "rights-based" system.

"This pattern has evolved behind closed doors in the pay and workplace strand of partnership negotiations," he said.

"As long as tripartite negotiations set the background for individual enterprise level agreements between owner managers and their largely non-unionised workers, most businesses were content to allow Ibec and Ictu to define the context of this process," he added.

"However, where these negotiations produce legally binding arrangements that constrain workers and management from freely agreeing their own working relationships, taking local circumstances into account, then that laissez-faire attitude cannot be sustained in the face of a growing democratic deficit."

Chambers Ireland is one of the bodies represented at the social partnership talks, but it is not involved directly in the pay element of the negotiations.

Mr O'Sullivan explained that this element of the partnership talks tends to be limited to organisations with trade union licences. Both Ibec and Ictu have these documents.

He told The Irish Times that Chambers Ireland would be seeking representation at the pay element of the social partnership talks.

The group also wants the issue of local authority charges placed on the agenda. Mr O'Sullivan said that Chambers Ireland's membership had to bear the brunt of increases in these levies.

Mr O'Sullivan also stressed that the organisation believed that partnership was vital to maintaining economic growth. "There is no alternative," he said.

He was speaking at the relaunch the Chambers of Commerce of Ireland as Chambers Ireland, a new single brand that will be shared by affiliated organisations around the country.

An Taoiseach Bertie Ahern formally launched the new chambers brand at a function in Dublin's Alexander Hotel yesterday.

Chambers Ireland has 59 member chambers and represents 12,000 businesses on the island of Ireland. It is the first organisation of its kind to take on a shared brand.