The chairman of the Labour Court, Mr Finbarr Flood, has called for a review of the State's industrial relations structures. He said at the weekend that from his experience companies were at their most vulnerable when strongest financially and that there was a similar danger of "squandering" the economic gains made by Irish society in recent years.
"This is, I believe, a defining moment for this country in that we are probably now at the height of our achievement and hence at our most vulnerable," he said. "The majority of today's workforce do not remember the difficult times we have come through with high levels of unemployment, rampant inflation, an economy which teetered on the edge of bankruptcy and an industrial relations landscape littered with disputes."
Mr Flood was amplifying on his comments at the conference, "Sustaining the Momentum", organised by Industrial Relations News at University College Dublin last Thursday. As the debate intensifies within the trade union movement and employer bodies on whether to accept the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, Mr Flood made it clear that the court would be taking seriously its new powers under the PPF.
This nominates the court as arbiter in disputes over whether employers or union are in breach of the agreement. The PPF also provides for parties unable to reach a negotiated agreement to refer their differences, jointly or separately, to the court and the Labour Relations Commission.
These provisions have been widely quoted by opponents of a new agreement within the trade union movement as a basis for rejecting it.
National agreements had brought a large element of stability and predictability to industrial relations, Mr Flood said. But the experience of Partnership 2000 "suggests that the theory does not always translate smoothly into practice," he said. "There have been strikes in both the public and private sectors on issues which had been dealt with, supposedly definitively, by the agreement.
He warned unions and employers that the court was no longer willing to tolerate delaying tactics in having cases heard.