The latest difficulties in the negotiations pose a real threat to the continuation of social partnership, writes Chris Dooley.
After more than four weeks of talks, the social partners have arrived at an agreement concerning a successor to Sustaining Progress.
The new partnership programme, it has been broadly agreed, should run for a longer period than the previous three-year deals. Just how long has yet to be sorted out; it could be six years, or it might be 10. But nobody is going to fall out over that.
There's just one sticking point:consensus on what the programme should contain is proving entirely elusive.
Negotiating partnership deals has never been easy and no round of talks is completed without some crisis, whether real or manufactured. There is no doubt, however, that the current difficulties pose a real threat to the continuation of social partnership.
Unions and employers are stuck on a key issue: what needs to be done to protect workers from exploitation and to maintain employment standards across the economy?
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions (Ictu) is seeking a range of new employment laws to underpin workers' pay and conditions.
Employers' bodies Ibec and the Construction Industry Federation respond that they are prepared to examine proposals to enhance enforcement of and compliance with existing legislation.
But they say a flexible labour market is essential if Ireland is to remain an attractive location for investment. An increase in the "regulatory burden", therefore, is something employers could not countenance.
It is not difficult to see where each side is coming from.
Union leaders point to the fact that, as far back as last October, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern acknowledged the justice of their demands for new measures to bolster employment standards.
In a letter to Ictu president Peter McLoone at the height of the Irish Ferries crisis, Mr Ahern accepted Ictu's view that an extensive review of the "policies, legislation and resources" applied to this area was required.
Mr Ahern's tacit support for new employment legislation was a first step towards enticing unions into talks on a new partnership deal when the ferries dispute was threatening to pull the rug from under the process.
Then, in December, the National Implementation Body (NIB) issued a statement, again in the context of the Irish Ferries row, which said there was a need to review employment protection measures and improve them "where necessary".
Ibec, along with Ictu and the Government, is represented on the NIB and was therefore party to this statement.
The relevance of all this is that, from the unions' perspective, Ibec signed up to the need for new employment protection measures in advance of the partnership talks, but is now refusing to do business.
Needless to say, this is not how the employers' body sees it.
In the first case, it points out that the NIB statement made specific reference to the need to maintain a flexible labour market. Even more to the point, Ibec claims there is nothing in the Taoiseach's letter or the NIB statement which would have prepared it for Ictu's "kitchen sink" approach to the current negotiations. This is a reference to the wide range of legislation which Ictu is proposing.
Ictu wants, for example, new legal mechanisms to guarantee workers not just the national minimum wage, but the "going rate" for jobs in their particular sector.
It also wants new laws to prevent employers from making people redundant in order to replace them with others on lower rates of pay, as happened in the Irish Ferries case.
Employers have responded with a comprehensive agenda of their own, much of it designed to increase labour market flexibility and facilitate workplace change.
About the only thing the sides agree on is that there is no chance of a deal by the mid-March target date. But it may be that there will be no agreement at all.