Public Service workers must embrace partnership or face the privatisation of their industries, a director of the National Centre for Partnership has warned.
Mr John Tierney was addressing a conference of public service union members in Dublin yesterday entitled "Public Service Partnership: A Trade Union Issue". "If trade unionists do not give leadership on the inevitability of change and deliver management of that change through partnership, then they will preside over the privatisation of these services," he said. "This will happen, if for no other reason than pure consumer demand."
He said that while there were some pockets of "good progress and development" in public service reform, he had not seen "any great surge of activity in the trade union movement to embrace change".
Opening the conference, the Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, said partnership between employees and management in the private sector was a relatively straightforward concept. Workers and management accepted they had a common interest in ensuring the competitiveness of their companies, he said.
"The Government, as employer, wishes to see our own staff benefit to the full from the opportunities created by a modern . . . and competitive society."
Partnership was "still at an early stage" in the public sector, he continued. Union leadership was very important and leaders must have a clear strategy, he added.
Ms Deborah King, executive director of the 1199 Project in New York, a programme established five years ago between the city's Health Care Workers' Union and the health industry, said the trade union movement could be a vital force in shaping national public policy if it embraced a changing market place.
Privatisation in the US had caused the loss of 300,000 federal jobs, out of a total of two million, "as well as thousands more state and municipal jobs", she said.
If services were privatised, she said, the managerial emphasis was on profit maximisation rather than necessarily on quality service provision. To retain their influence, trade unions "need to think about what the public needs".
"Public service workers really do want to contribute and do a high-quality job. The way work has been organised up to now, it has not been up to the workers to think about how best a service can be delivered. Now, management and workers need to be open to that concept of involving workers in those kinds of decisions.
"If the trade union movement doesn't get ahead of this, it is not going to be relevant to people's concerns," she said. "If it does, it will become an increasingly vibrant and important force in shaping society."
Yesterday's conference was organised by the National Centre for Partnership.
