The breakdown of discipline over social partnership negotiations sends a worrying signal not just to politicians and civil servants, but to business managers also. It has also served to highlight a fundamental change in how we are governed.
Under Partnership 2000, business has been encouraged to engage in partnership-type arrangements at company level. There is a centre for partnership in the heart of the Government to promote such developments. The way partnership is now being used as a threat and a constraint on the Budget (one not actually covered by a partnership agreement), has created a very different atmosphere around the idea of partnership itself. Instead of a virtuous circle of mutual advantage, there is now partnership with teeth, with vetoes, walk-outs and accusations of infidelity. It is heading towards the partnership of mutually assured destruction. This is not good for the State. It is definitely not encouraging for company-level partnership. As a breather is taken over Christmas, there ought to be some reflection on whether partnership is a tired solution to yesterday's problems. Can partnership really be the essential means to any and all ends, whatever the changing economic circumstances? The arguments against are mounting. For example, labour conditions are such that a one-size-fits-all wage policy is not appropriate. Private sector unionisation is only 30 per cent, and the sector of the economy which has highest productivity, the foreign-owned, is much less unionised still. Why should workers and management in a less productive industry be rewarded for the higher productivity of another?
The ICTU "sharing the gains" concept is surely implemented essentially on a company-by-company basis. It is not about Eircom workers sharing in Glanbia's gains. A centralised partnership agreement is not necessarily in the interests of all unionised workers.
The objections to partnership as a dilution of parliamentary democracy raised by John Bruton back in the 1980s (whatever about his rather opportunistic private members' bill this week) have surely not disappeared just because partnership helped solve particular problems. Mr Bruton was right then. There has been and continues to be a dilution of democracy. But is it worth it? The political cost of a new partnership agreement should be judged not against the achievements of the past, but against prospective benefits. Just because it worked to solve yesterday's problems doesn't mean it will work to solve today's and tomorrow's. Back in 1990, the National Economic and Social Council said: "The major argument for the continuation of a negotiated national consensus is that, once a macroeconomic policy centred on the EMS is in place, consensus on the evolution of incomes prevents conflicts over incomes disrupting the economy and thus facilitates employment growth". The context has changed radically since then. But fundamentally, social partnership was then seen as a means to desirable ends. NESC has since changed significantly its view of what partnership is for.
The recent NESC document, Opportunities Challenges and Capacities for Choice, says there is no one perfect partnership structure which will work in all circumstances. Fair enough. "Rather, we should consider what actions are needed to secure the foundations of partnership structures, broadly conceived." Rather than question its usefulness now, the point is to build in partnership permanently.
It goes on: "The objective is a negotiated consensus on key economic and social issues, not adherence to a particular formula. Our present model of social partnership is the means through which we have achieved this to date, not the end." Clearly, the "negotiated consensus" is now seen as an end in itself by NESC, not just a means to economic and social objectives. Partnership is to be institutionalised. It is to become a permanent political structure. And there is where John Bruton, and a lot more of us, ought to think twice about the idea that partnership is capable any longer of being assessed on the gains it brings, on balance.
Not at all. We are to have partnership, no matter what gains it promises or delivers. Just like we are to have a Dail, no matter what. Partnership is to be rooted in the bedrock of our political system, in the very way we are governed. A national wage agreement has become "negotiated governance" and it is here to stay.
That is the direction of the negotiated consensus made by the partnership process itself. The way it has happened is reminiscent of how greater powers are appropriated by supra-national bodies. Just as a fair challenge was put to European supra-nationalism in the early 1990s, so too should the partnership dilution of democracy be challenged. Partnership as a means to identifiable, worthwhile ends, yes; partnership as a constraint on electoral sovereignty and as an end in itself, no.
Oliver O'Connor is editor of the monthly publication, Finance. E-mail: ooconnor@indigo.ie
