Trade unionists and human resource managers "should set about convincing those who employ us" that only real partnership between managements and unions can sustain our competitive advantage into the future, the general secretary of the ICTU, Mr Peter Cassells, has told the Institute of Personnel and Development.

Mr Cassells warned that Partnership 2000 was entering a critical phase. If employers were not willing to begin sharing information, profits and power during the coming year then there would be no more national agreements. Personnel and human resource managers had a key role to play in this process.

Mr Cassells was addressing the opening day of the IPD conference in Galway yesterday, where the theme was People Strategies for a New Age. The conference is looking at ways of ensuring human resource policies maximise the competitive advantage of enterprises.

He said the personnel dimension of business was becoming more decisive for company performance. "Fifty years ago seven out of 10 jobs needed manual skills and the rest were cerebral. Today, more than seven out of every 10 jobs involve cerebral skills and less than three out of 10 require manual skills.

"This ongoing transformation of work from brawn to brain is, perhaps, the single most important change in the world of work since the industrial revolution," he said. "The traditional trinity of land, labour and capital no longer determines the prosperity of a country.

"The success of individual companies and organisations will increasingly depend on the level of education of their workers and on workers' ability to innovate and communicate, using the most advanced forms of modern technology. These self-confident, selfstarting people who make up the workforce of today and tomorrow pose no challenges for those of you who are personnel/HR practitioners people managers.

"Neither of the old-fashioned carrot and stick approaches to management `My door is always open', or, `If you don't like it here, you know what to do', will work. Managers who rely on paternalism or power will fail.

"Human Resource Managers who respect workers as equals, who operate on principles of mutual trust and who genuinely aim to empower workers, individually and collectively, can help to develop a workforce that will withstand the pressures of an increasingly competitive global economy."

But Mr Cassells warned: "Any attempts to use the tools of HRM to manipulate workers, or to undermine their unions will be resisted by workers and unions."

Modern workers posed new challenges for unions as well as companies, "presenting us with demands for new services and new forms of representation", he said. "As the information society proceeds apace and the demand for information rich workers grows, many unions are already involved as brokers in lifelong learning and, in some cases, providing that learning themselves."

Trade unions were already exploring the possibilities of shared learning experiments with managers and this represented "an area which has great potential for the future".

Mr Cassells said everyone could take pride in the ranking of Ireland in 11th place among the 46 most competitive economies with the world by the International Institute of Management Development. Few would deny the vital role unions had played in Ireland's economic transformation.

"The contribution of unions to our economic boom cannot be measured simply in terms of wage moderation. Credit must go workers for co-operation with changes that were unimaginable even 10 years ago," he added.

"Having achieved competitive advantage, the challenge now is how to sustain that advantage. We need to be mindful of the recent and fragile nature of our economic success and of the threats and dangers that lie ahead."

He congratulated the IPD on its initiative in making human resource strategy central to business planning. All such initiatives "must be introduced in a spirit of genuine partnership with workers and their unions".

He warned that only these type of initiatives "will get the commitment of workers and the support of unions. Changes that are imposed, are implemented reluctantly and begrudgingly by conscripts, and do little or nothing for the organisation. Changes that are agreed are implemented with enthusiasm by volunteers.

"They help us sustain the competitive advantage of companies and of countries."

Partnership required sharing information, "profits and power if Partnership 2000 is not to be the last of the partnership agreements. The broad commitments to power-sharing and profit-sharing will have to become concrete realities for workers over the next year."

Workers attitudes to profits had changed radically over the past decade, Mr Cassells said. "Unions had made workers more aware of the importance of profitability and competitiveness. Unfortunately employers have not shown the same willingness to change their approach."