A new form of "turbo-capitalism" that is harder and more ruthless than its predecessor is threatening the fabric of our society, ICTU general secretary Mr David Begg has told the Irish Business and Employers' Confederation (IBEC).
"The balance of power between labour and capital which was the cement of the welfare state in the post-war settlement has been disturbed by the increased mobility of capital.
"Social cohesion requires a serious rethink on the part of business of its relationship with organised labour," he said. "In short, it might be in the long-term interest of business to take a more constructive approach to that relationship."
He was speaking as guest of honour at an IBEC lunch at which, as incoming president of the ICTU, he met senior figures in the business community. He told them: "The dominant wisdom of today's economic debate is the global free market, triumphant it seems, as never before.
"The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of capitalism as having no worldwide rival is a remarkable change. Moreover, it is a very particular kind of capitalism that has emerged victorious from its competition with communism. It is a capitalism which is much harder, more mobile, more ruthless and more certain about what it needs to make it tick. It has been called turbocapitalism, in contrast to the more controlled regulated capitalism of the 1950s and 60s.
"Its overriding objective is to serve the interest of property owners and shareholders, and it has a firm belief, effectively an ideological one, that all obstacles to its capacity to do that . . . are unjustified and should be removed.
"Its ideology is that shareholder value must be maximised, that labour markets should be `flexible' and that capital should be free to invest and disinvest in industries and countries at will. The general term `globalisation' is used, somewhat inexactly, to describe this phenomenon.
"From this dominant wisdom flows a range of assertions and assumptions about the degrees of freedom available to individual countries to pursue economic and social goals. Across the whole range of Government policies . . . competitiveness, it is asserted, must be the key criterion, overriding other nice but unaffordable objectives."
While acknowledging competitiveness was important at company level, Mr Begg argued that it was considerably less so at national and European level. The latter view was based on the fact that EU trade was mainly internal.