Is social partnership still alive?
It is interesting to look at the speech made by by the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen TD, at the Fianna Fail Ard-Fheis (annual conference) this past weekend. One of the things I noticed is that he made no reference in it to social partnership. Later in media interviews he repeated his desire to restart talks between the social partners, but previously he had also expressed agreement with the reported view of the General Secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions that such talks were worthwhile only where ‘there is a reasonable degree of confidence that agreement on all the central elements can be found’.
In the context of threatened industrial action and protests, this seems to me to be a matter of some priority. Social partnership, in the form of the Programme for National Recovery, produced the conditions in which Ireland’s economic growth of the 1990s was able to proceed; it was negotiated at a time when Ireland’s economic performance had been terrible, with low or negative growth, considerable public debt and very high unemployment and inflation.
If we are now to slip into a situation in which our recovery plans are the subject of battles on the streets, then it is unlikely that we can achieve that recovery at all, and it is certainly unlikely that Ireland will seem to anyone to be an attractive place in which to invest or do business.
Social partnership does not of course provide easy answers either, as the expectations of the various groups represented may not easily be reconcilable. It may in particular seem doubtful to some whether the trade unions could carry their members in adopting and implementing painful measures, further expenditure cuts and income reductions; those are all inevitable. But even in times such as these there is some room for government action to improve conditions for disadvantaged groups, support the build-up of skills in the national workforce and develop an agenda for equal opportunities and diversity.
We are now looking at a very threatening picture, and concerted action is needed to avoid it. Difficult as it will be, I don’t see how we can easily succeed without involving the social partners.
This entry was posted on March 3, 2009 at 12:52 am and is filed under economy, politics. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.
Tags: Brian Cowen, social partnership
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March 4, 2009 at 4:53 pm
In the good times we had the heads of the various Irish Universities trying to make parallels between their work and that of industry CEOs. In bad times industry CEOs take responsibility and assume leadership rather than hiding behind legal opinion and their peer group not wanting to break ranks or somesuch. How about some real leadership Ferdinand, and a $1 salary like Steve Jobs? That’s what real leaders do!
March 4, 2009 at 7:42 pm
David, I’m afraid I don’t really know what you are referring to when you talk about ‘hiding behind legal opinion’. Certainly there is no legal opinion on anything that I am ‘hiding behind’. Again, not sure what you are referring to when you refer to ‘breaking ranks’ – about what? DCU has never been afraid to push ahead, as we are doing right now with a number of things.
As for Steve Jobs and his $1 – I have a huge admiration for him, and if I had his wealth I’d also go be happy with a salary of $1. But I agree that this is a time when big claims for salary and income by university Presidents would be totally out of place.