The Government must tackle inflation and the housing crisis if the new national agreement is to hold, the general secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Mr Peter Cassells, has warned.
He has also told employers that they must honour commitments on partnership at local level "in the spirit as well as the letter" of the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness if it is to work.
Mr Cassells was responding to yesterday's debate at the special delegate conference of ICTU in Liberty Hall, Dublin. Delegates voted by 251 to 112 to enter a new agreement.
His aim was not just to answer critics of the PPF within the movement but to emphasise to other social partners that the 69 per cent vote represented unity of purpose rather than complacency.
"This is an interdependent package and, if any one element is not delivered, then the other elements are in immediate danger," Mr Cassells said.
"If, for example, the measures agreed in the PPF for tackling the housing crisis are not implemented by the Government, the prohibitive cost of housing will convince workers that their wage increases should not be limited to the moderate terms of this agreement.
"If the Government allows market forces to push inflation to a level that impacts on living standards, this will force workers to seek compensation through higher wages."
There was a clear obligation on employers to honour the new national minimum wage of £4.40 an hour in sectors such as retailing, where the current rates were as low as £2.73. Employers who failed to do so would find "we will use the traditional methods of the trade union movement to make it happen".
Similarly, "employers must realise that profit and gain-sharing provisions in this programme will have to be honoured in the spirit as well as the letter". If the present imbalance between profits and wages did not improve "during this programme, the credibility of the partnership process will be undermined.
"If employers are not willing to enter into genuine profit-sharing and power-sharing partnerships at local level, they can no longer expect congress to support partnership at national level. We will support this process for as long as it is compatible with our overall strategy," he said. "This can only mean a fair deal for workers and a fair society for everyone."
The strongest speech against the agreement came from the ATGWU's Irish secretary, Mr Mick O'Reilly. "Delegates know of the widespread anger among teachers and many others who are opposed to this agreement," he said.
Irish workers were "tremendously underpaid" and "the only way bottlenecks in the labour market can be overcome is for employers and employees to ignore the wage guidelines in the PPF". People were claiming that national agreements represented a "socialisation of the Irish economy" but profits had increased by 68 per cent while wages had declined by nearly 30 per cent. Nothing in the PPF would reverse that trend.
The SIPTU president, Mr Des Geraghty, said people had "genuine fears" but it was possible to influence issues such as inflation only by having the power to do so.
The current round of national agreements had been established "in the teeth of opposition from the same right-wing economists who have now joined with the ultra-left and others who want to keep the trade union movement out of the centres of power in this society".
The IMPACT general secretary, Mr Peter McLoone, said trade unionists were far better informed on the issues when voting on the PPF than ever before. If there was a shortcoming they had to address, it was the failure to close the growing gap between rich and poor.