The future of Tara Mines will cast a long shadow over the ICTU conference this week. The announcement by the Finnish owner, Outokompu, yesterday of the decision to press ahead with closure plans, despite a Labour Court recommendation that it continues to use a partnership approach to make the Navan plant viable, will certainly sharpen the debate on any successor to Partnership 2000.
Last week one of the main opponents of national agreements, ATGWU leader Mr Michael O'Reilly, published a pamphlet to coincide with the conference claiming partnership had failed. He called for "a new model for wage bargaining and economic power-sharing" to take its place.
As it happened, last week also saw the European Trade Union Congress meet in Helsinki, where ICTU general secretary Mr Peter Cassells gave the keynote address. The subject was, of course, social partnership.
Mr Cassells argued that partnership was not only still the way forward for Irish trade unions, but for rejuvenating the sagging European social model as well. If no successor was agreed to Partnership 2000, he said, this made development of social partnership all the more important at sectoral and company level.
And, while Mr O'Reilly calls on the trade union movement to return to its roots and pursue social change by building a strong political movement around the Labour Party and other left-wing groups, Mr Cassells told trade unionists in Helsinki that they must accept the need to do business with whatever parties are in power. A lifelong member of the Labour Party, Mr Cassells nevertheless said that unions had to step out of traditional moulds and make the winning of public opinion an integral part of their campaigns.
Public opinion was important in winning local disputes on issues such as low pay and union recognition, he said, but it was also the key to securing better childcare facilities for workers, affordable housing, good public transport and better pupil-teacher ratios.
A sign of ICTU's commitment to developing social dialogue is that the director general of the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation, Mr John Dunne, will attend tomorrow to participate in a debate on "Modernising the Workplace".
Mr O'Reilly's pamphlet, A New Agenda for Economic Power-Sharing, will certainly provide plenty of ammunition for opponents of social partnership. While some of his figures are open to challenge, his most cogent argument is not. This is that the share of GDP going to wage-earners has fallen by over 13 per cent since national agreements were re-introduced in 1987.
He estimates that the average worker would be at least £2,500 a year better off now if the percentage of GDP going into wage packets had been maintained at the same level as in 1987. "This loss has occurred because of the wage caps under national agreements, with real gross wages rising by a meagre 1.2 per cent per annum," he writes. "If trade unionists were able to negotiate wages locally, labour's share in the economic boom would have been more significant."
It is a claim that will strike a response in many workers, especially the growing numbers who are too young to remember the "free-for-all" of the 1980s. Yet Mr O'Reilly's "power-sharing" plan, which seeks flat rate increases to benefit the low paid, across-the-board percentage increases to match economic growth and, finally, extra rises for those working in the most successful companies, is not very different from the ideas being mooted by other trade union leaders. Indeed SIPTU regional secretary Mr Jack O'Connor flagged similar ideas at SIPTU conferences earlier this year; and Mr Cassells himself suggested a more flexible approach to pay would be needed during an interview with The Irish Times.
How far the employers are willing to go down this road may well be the issue on which a successor to Partnership 2000 stands or falls. Mr Dunne's contribution to tomorrow's debate should provide an early indicator of employers' thoughts in that direction. What Tara Mines does over the next fortnight will be an equally fateful straw in the wind.