A THIRD senior trade union leader in as many days has expressed serious doubts that a successor to Partnership 2000 can be negotiated.
IMPACT's general secretary, Mr Peter McLoone, said at the weekend that any attempt by the Government to make performance-related pay a precondition of a successor to Partnership 2000 could jeopardise any new national agreement.
He said there were no simplistic ways of breaking public service pay linkages, and it would require substantial effort and imagination on both sides to find an alternative.
Although public service unions had few trade union recognition problems, the issue was "a central piece of the partnership jigsaw for all of us, and until the issue is resolved there remains a gaping hole in the partnership picture".
Mr McLoone was speaking at the IRN journal conference on "Managing Change and Innovation" at University College Dublin at the weekend.
The vice-president of SIPTU, Mr Des Geraghty, and the Irish secretary of the ATGWU, Mr Mick O'Reilly, have also warned that failure to resolve the union recognition issue would pose serious obstacles to a new agreement.
Mr McLoone said union recognition was now becoming an issue for his members as they did not believe it was credible "to tell workers that they are tied into a partnership model, with all the discipline that imposes on them, and then turn around and say that employers can choose to opt out".
"It is particularly galling in the case of private-sector employers who have experienced massive growth on the back of Ireland's economic success and the increase in disposable wealth that this has delivered."
On public pay, he warned the Government that "a simplistic book-keeping approach is inadequate because it says nothing about the level and quality of services provided".
There was "much talk in Government circles about breaking the `links' between public sector groups", but the "recent pay problems in the public service flow directly from an attempt to deal with one group in isolation from others. It was never going to work, and unions warned the Government in advance that this approach would not succeed."
If the Government simply insisted on the abandonment of existing pay relativities and the introduction of performance-related pay throughout the public sector as a precondition for a new national agreement that agreement could be a long time coming.
However, the secretary-general for the public service at the Department of Finance, Mr John Hurley, warned unions at the weekend that there was "no surer way of killing the Celtic Tiger than paying ourselves more than our competitors".
"For the public service it is essential that pay developments do not put pressures on private-sector pay rates and are consistent with the expenditure targets within which the Government must operate."