THE Taoiseach has warned the State's 500,000 trade unionists that a rejection of the new national agreement, Partnership 2000, could lead to a return to high inflation, high interest rates and higher taxation.
Mr Bruton has also called on nurses, and other public service workers, to pursue their claims without resorting to strike action.
"Partnership, patience and conciliation - not pickets and confrontation - are the best way to achieve prosperity for all of us," he said at the formal launch of Partnership 2000 in Dublin Castle yesterday.
The reason social partnership had been so successful over the past decade was because of its success in resolving differences in a framework of conciliation.
There had been agreement on the priorities of macro-economic policy and acceptance of the need to widen and deepen the partnership to include marginalised groups.
Economic success, jobs growth and the extra resources that flowed from this strategy "are fundamentally predicated on the sound management of our public finances.
As a society we must all accept that reality.
"We can deal with disputes about the sharing out of the benefits of growth, provided we do so within the framework of sound finances. If significant groups ignore or upset prudent public finances, then there are real dangers that the consensus on which our total success has been built will not hold.
"Let me put it another way, Ireland is doing well because we have devised, and kept to, an agreed formula to avoid strikes. That encouraged international investors to rely on us, and on our services, and to put their money here, to create jobs for us and for our children."
This approach had laid the basis for greater competitiveness, more employment and a reduced tax burden, Mr Bruton said.
Industrial peace had been widely respected under national programmes since 1987. "That was the deal," he stressed.
"Nobody was entirely satisfied with their pay increases, but everybody ultimately became better off and remains better off."
Turning to the nurses and other discontented groups within the public service, such as teachers and Civil Service clerical grades, Mr Bruton said: "Every worker believes their work is valuable Every public servant does important work.
"If one group were to go off on its own, we would soon arrive back at what I remember Sean Lemass so graphically describing in the 1960s as the situation of leapfrogging claims.
"One group remedies their sense of injustice by a successful pay claim, backed by threat of a strike, only to have another group of workers leap over them later on with an even bigger claim. Soon everyone is worse off, because taxes, prices or interest rates have had to be increased to pay these successive claims. This is not a scenario to which this country should return.
"Of course, people will say politics comes into it. Some will even say, `If a Government has an election coming up, they have to pay up, don't they?'
"The truth is that a government, whether before or after an election, is not spending its own money. It is spending money that it compulsorily takes from other people through taxation.
He conceded that "just grievances do indeed exist" and that "the increased demands on certain on certain professions must be realistically addressed". But this had to be done in a way that avoided leapfrogging claims.
"The situation of nurses is one for which many people ... will feel sympathy and understanding.
"This is a dispute I believe can and must be settled. That settlement must be within the freely negotiated and agreed framework for pay, industrial relations and the public finances, which I have just outlined and which takes into account the interests of everyone in our society."