THE director of the US Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, Mr Richard Barnes, says he is intrigued by the Irish experiment in social partnership. But he expresses concern about how much the concept exists "lower down".

It's a shrewd assessment by Mr Barnes, who was appointed head of the US equivalent of the Labour Relations Commission, in January. He was in Ireland this week to examine how the Irish brand of social partnership works, before travelling on to an international conference of mediation services in London.

The US experience of partnership has been quite the reverse of Ireland. It has started at local level and built up, usually on an industry or sectoral basis. "We do not have national partnerships," he says, "they tend to come from the unions and employers. They tend to start at local level and move upwards in scope." Recent examples include the health-care services and the country's pulp and paper mills. The sheer size of the organisations are enormous by Irish standards. For example, one recent partnership arrangement brokered by the FMCS is at Kaiser Permanente, a private health maintenance enterprise with 100,000 employees on the US west coast.

Mr Barnes says the world of industrial relations is shifting. "There's recognition by many progressive trade union leaders and some of our management that the workforce is a potential competitive advantage.

"We must rethink the position of workers. They are being seen as a company's greatest potential asset and employers are realising they can no longer have management by edict." He says that partnership agreements are "incrementally becoming a part of American industrial relations".

He cannot say if this means US unions had stopped spending huge amounts in legal fees to fight recognition battles in the courts. There had been an increase in the intensity and length of strikes in the 1990s - up from an average duration of 30 days a decade ago to 54 days last year. But the number of strikes had more than halved, down from 1,000 to 412.

There was no discernible pattern to the new wave of "mean-spirited" disputes which had broken out, Mr Barnes said. They also remained a tiny proportion of the 55,000 disputes recorded by his service in the private sector last year.

About 85 per cent of these disputes are resolved at local level without any involvement by the FMCS, but his staff of 200 are clearly stretched to cover those that do require outside assistance. The service had to cope with another 400 disputes in the public sector, mainly at federal level. It can become involved in public sector disputes at state or even local authority level, but this occurs rarely.

Unlike the Labour Relations Commission, the FMCS has no separate advisory division to engage in educational and preventative work. Mr Barnes says he is particularly anxious to see how the LRC operates in this area.

Officers within his own service deal with mediation, conciliation and advisory functions. About half of them are drawn, like himself, from a trade-union background. He worked for 17 years as a representative of the Labourers International Union of North America, which organises workers in the construction, health care and manufacturing sectors. He operated mainly in construction.

About 35 per cent of FMCS staff are recruited from management and 15 per cent from academia and the legal profession.

He says that there are a good many attorneys seeking to use their skills and knowledge constructively, rather than in a grind of daily confrontation. Whatever their background, all FMSC staff are trained to be much more than good negotiators. "Mediators must be process experts, as well," he says, able to understand the dynamics of conflict and organisational behaviour.

"The traditional model of `spit-in-your-face bargaining' is changing. There is a movement to an interest-based approach, from a rights-based approach to bargaining."

The increasing participation of women in the workforce is also changing the agenda. Mr Barnes points out that issues like child care were not on the industrial relations agenda 20 years ago. Another increasingly common issue is elder care. The "baby boomers" born after the second World War now need someone to care for their parents while they are at work.

He is aware of the negative image that US companies have within the Irish labour movement because of their hostility towards trade unions. He says that these companies have a similar approach to industrial relations in the US. As director of a state agency he refused to be drawn on his own views. However, he said his own agency survived on the basis of its ability to work with the customer, be that employer or trade union. Whatever the attitude of a company towards trade unions, he says that the FMCS would "encourage them to keep their lines of communication open".