Talks on a possible national pay deal enter a make-or-break phase today, with unions claiming that an irretrievable breakdown is looming.
Informal contacts over the weekend failed to produce a formula that could bridge the gap between the unions' demand for cost-of-living pay rises and employers' insistence on a six-month pay pause.
If an agreement is not brokered by Wednesday, unions in the private sector will immediately begin preparing pay claims at local level, in a return to free-for-all bargaining for the first time since the 1980s.
A new social partnership deal, to succeed the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness (PPF), would then become impossible to achieve, the president of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Senator Joe O'Toole, said last night.
"If anybody thinks it's just a matter of the talks breaking down and then everybody coming back together, they are mistaken," he said. "If it goes beyond Wednesday the situation will be irretrievable."
Wednesday is the critical day because, Senator O'Toole said, the executive council of ICTU would be meeting then to advise its member-unions whether they should start preparing pay claims.
That date, December 18th, had been fixed from the outset of the talks when the ICTU had written to unions advising them it had until then to reach an agreement.
Branch secretaries of various unions had, in the meantime, been instructed to withhold claims until the process was concluded.
Unions had no room to manoeuvre, he added, because the PPF expired for many workers in the private sector on December 31st. From Wednesday, unions had just six days to prepare and lodge pay claims before Christmas.
Senator O'Toole said many of the initial claims were likely to be "headline-setting" in highly profitable companies, which could afford to pay increases well ahead of the rate of inflation. Once such claims were lodged, it would be impossible to reel them in next year in the interests of a national agreement.
"It seems we have to spell it out in simple terms. If we had a deadline of February 1st, the situation might be retrievable after a breakdown in talks, but we don't," he said. Senator O'Toole said he was generally seen as an optimist in negotiations and he had no doubt that the two sides could do a deal.
Agreement would have to be reached on key areas like pay, union recognition and redundancy by Wednesday to make a wider social partnership deal possible.
Reacting to his comments, Mr Brendan McGinty, director of industrial relations with the employers' body, IBEC, said all sides were engaged in a process of trying to bridge the gap on pay and had agreed to consider their respective positions.
"If the trade union movement chooses to pre-empt matters then that is a decision for them. And should that lead to a collapse in the negotiations they will have to bear responsibility for it," he said.
Mr McGinty said IBEC remained at the table "to see if the trade unions are prepared to recognise the imperative of breaking the wage-price spiral". Unions' failure to observe and comply with the terms of the PPF, he claimed, had contributed to wage inflation, which was a significant factor in the economy's overall inflation rate.
IBEC remained firmly of the view that to address this a six-month pay pause followed by increases in low single figures was required. Apart from pay, a key issue for the unions in the partnership talks is their demand for legislation, similar to that introduced two years ago in Britain, obliging employers to allow workers to be represented by a trade union.
Senator O'Toole said the wider social agenda was also of critical importance in any national partnership deal.
