Employers and unions can at last move on to the negotiation of pay increases having spent nearly three months on other pressing issues, writes Chris Dooley, Industry and Employment Correspondent
Even for the battle-hardened negotiators, the current round of partnership talks has been an endurance test without precedent.
"It takes us two hours to cross a 't' and four hours to dot an 'i'," one participant was heard to groan recently as employers and unions struggled to reach a deal on employment standards.
Twelve weeks since the parties first got together at Government Buildings, however, sufficient progress has been made to enable them to move on to other issues, including pay.
A significant first step, then, has finally been taken towards agreeing a new social partnership programme. But an overall deal remains far from assured.
What the parties have done is reach an outline agreement on a range of measures designed to address union concerns about the exploitation of migrant workers and job displacement.
New legal mechanisms, for example, have been worked out to deter employers from sacking workers in order to replace them with cheaper labour. This has been referred to by those on the union side as the "Irish Ferries on land" scenario, after that company's decision last year to replace its unionised seafarers with cheaper labour from abroad.
What is envisaged is that a special panel would be established to examine whether redundancies in a particular situation amounted to displacement of jobs. The panel would advise the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment on whether a case should be referred to the Labour Court.
The court, in turn, would give its opinion on whether the case was a legitimate redundancy situation, or one of displacement as defined under the new legislation. An employer who chose to ignore a negative finding of the court could face punitive consequences.
The Minister could withhold redundancy rebates, for example. And the affected employees could take an unfair dismissal case to the Employment Appeals Tribunal.
Furthermore, the current compensation ceiling of two years' salary in unfair dismissal cases would not apply.
Employers have ensured, however, that the proposed new legislation would not prevent them from engaging in "normal business activity" such as outsourcing or contracting out work. Nor would they be prevented from hiring agency workers to cover temporary or cyclical business needs.
In other words, only employers who made workers collectively redundant, on a compulsory basis, for the purpose of directly replacing them with cheaper labour, would be affected by the new legislation.
Agreeing this particular measure has taken up a huge amount of the negotiators' time, given the legal complexities involved. But it is only one of a range of issues on which progress has been made in recent weeks. New legislation is also on the cards to prevent companies from sacking workers during an industrial dispute, as happened in the Gate Gourmet case in Britain last year.
Other measures on the cards include the proposed appointment of 60 additional labour inspectors, working for a new agency set up to enforce employment standards.
It is no surprise, then, that the executive council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions last night endorsed their negotiators' view that sufficient progress had been made to allow the talks to move on to the much-delayed pay and workplace agenda.
Employers, for their part, are likely to be satisfied that the proposed legislation is limited to specific areas, such as displacement, and will not introduce unwarranted inflexibilities to the labour market.
A sigh of relief all round, then, that the talks have got this far. But with a range of difficult workplace issues such as pay and pensions yet to be addressed, this endurance test is far from finished.