A RETURN to industrial confrontation would be "extremely damaging", a senior civil servant has warned a public sector management conference. But a trade union leader responded by saying confrontation was inevitable without a radical change in the way managers saw their staff.
Both were addressing the Institute of Public Administration Personnel Management conference in Killiney yesterday.
Earlier, the Minister for Enterprise and Employment, Mr Bruton, said Irish managers and companies were still unaware of the importance of strategic management, good communications and the need to upgrade skills on a continuous basis. In a global market "it is imperative that management recognises the importance of developing skills of its workforce, particularly at management level", he said.
The assistant secretary at Mr Bruton's Department, Mr Brian Whitney, told the conference that a return to industrial confrontation would he particularly unfortunate on the eve of EMU. "We should be in no doubt but that the positive trends of recent years could be equally rapidly reversed," he said.
However, the general secretary of the Irish Nurses Organisation Mr P.J. Madden, said too many managers see "the worker as simply another item of production and one of the more inefficient ones at that". For any future agreement to succeed, it would need to give employees a say in how the economy developed at firm and enterprise level. "Partnership at national level, with autocracy at local level, is simply not acceptable", he said.