Social partnership at national level is showing signs of fatigue, the deputy general secretary of the ICTU, Ms Patricia O'Donovan, told the CORI conference in Dublin yesterday.
"It needs to be reinvigorated by effective partnerships at the workplace and in the community," she said. "Transferring the social partnership concept into a tangible form at workplace level has been one of the biggest challenges for the trade union movement.
"If most workers do not see the `value-added' of social partnership and do not experience the `feel-good' factor associated with it in their day-to-day dealings with employers, this failure will eat away at the heart of national partnership". She said that the big No vote for Partnership 2000 reflected this feeling.
Involvement in national agreements was a matter of strategy rather than policy or ideology, she said. The objective was to protect the living standards of workers and those on fixed incomes.
Mr Brian Geoghegan, IBEC director, said that employers were currently consulting members on a successor to Partnership 2000. Expectations must be tempered by the reality of the market, which would quickly punish any loss of competitiveness, he said. However, social inclusion should continue to form a central part of any new programme.
To move forward would require greater transparency in social spending. "Fictions" such as the notion that community employment schemes were part of the State's labour market programme rather than social economy initiatives should be abandoned.
He warned that public service pay had been allowed to rise too rapidly under Partnership 2000 and said that many infrastructural needs would have to be tackled through public-private partnership projects. User charges for items like water and sewage would have to be "revisited" to both encourage investment and more efficient usage.
The conference was told by Ms Patricia O'Hara, development consultant, that traditional family farms could no longer provide the basis for sustaining rural communities. She said social partnership had not been very effective in managing change.
Those in farming occupations accounted for only a quarter of the rural labour force, and only half of household income on Irish farms came from agriculture.
There were dangers that the boom in holiday homes would distort and further marginalise local populations. Partnership, she said, should be used to develop more integrated strategic development policies.