Professor Bill Roche comments on IMPACT's decision

THE decision by the executive of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) to call off next Monday's day of action and to re-enter talks with the Government and employers at least postpones any campaign of concerted industrial action.

The decision by the Association of Higher Civil Servants against participation will not have come as a great surprise.

In a climate where top level public servants have opted for voluntary pay cuts, such a decision reflects a similar posture of sharing the pain among the higher echelons of the public service.

Anyway, this union's decision would have had little bearing on the success of the day of action in the public service.

The surprise decision of IMPACT members not to ratify the Congress campaign had threatened to dilute the effects of working stoppages in the public sector.

With over 55,000 members, IMPACT makes up a significant proportion of the roughly 300,000 union members in the public sector. Given that other public service unions are represented in most of the workplaces where IMPACT members are employed, the union's decision not to participate would not have fatally compromised the planned work stoppages, as many IMPACT members were likely to have refused to cross the picket lines.

Why IMPACT members' support for the day of action fell just short of the required 66pc margin will be a major concern for the union's leaders.

IMPACT is a well organised, well led and professionally run trade union.

In contrast with some other public service unions, such as the CPSU, it has little tradition of either union members or elected representatives overturning the advice of senior officials. IMPACT has also long been a stalwart of both ICTU and of social partnership. There is little reason to believe that the members were unsupportive of the ICTU 10-point plan for economic recovery and its core concept of a 'social solidarity pact'. IMPACT members were to the forefront of a recent campaign to lobby public representatives in support of Congress's proposals and in opposition to the public service pensions levy.

The most significant factor in the union's vote is likely to have been the leadership's inability to convince a significant minority of members that a national strike would be an effective industrial relations weapon in the current environment.

Ironically, the union's own record of moderation under social partnership could have predisposed large numbers of its members against adopting a more militant posture this time around.

The most significant effect of IMPACT's decision was to weaken the moral authority of ICTU's campaign, not least given the uneven support that the day of action was likely to have attracted across the private sector.

With an overall rate of private sector unionisation of about 28pc, the campaign would likely have had an uneven or patchy effect across that sector, and major areas like public utilities, banks and retailers were likely to have been largely unaffected.

Against such a background, ICTU will have been relieved that its main objective in calling for the day of action, to persuade Government and the employers to re-engage in talks, has met with a positive response.

The Government already accepted ICTU's 10-point plan and concept of a social solidarity pact as a broad basis for engagement back in February, and the Taoiseach has again pointed out this week that he sees some merit in ICTU's proposals.

So the talks are likely to focus again around this framework. Scope seems to exist for some restructuring of the pension levy, with a view to reducing the burden on low paid public servants, as well as for closing off tax shelters and introducing a property tax -- all measures favoured by ICTU.

Given the worsening fiscal situation, the unions will want to ensure that changes to income tax are structured in a strongly progressive manner.

This still leaves many potential break points in the talks, not least around such areas as cuts in public services and on the question of pay. Indications of a softening of IBEC's posture on this central issue, away from insisting on a universal and indefinite pay freeze, still leaves a wide gap between the parties over pay -- even without taking account the Construction Industry Federation's demand for a 10pc wage cut in the building industry.

An intriguing aspect of the crisis of social partnership has been the posture of Brian Cowen. Social partnership is less central to Cowen's political identity and track record than to that of his predecessor, Bertie Ahern.

He seems to have adopted a more hard-headed and contingent posture toward the process -- viewing it as one of several options for resolving issues in a short time frame, but not otherwise worthy of the rather elevated philosophical commitment that seemed to be at the core of Ahern's political credo.

If the reconvened talks succeed in reaching an agreement, any new accord seems likely to bring about a fundamental alteration to the social partnership model.

Until the current crisis, the social partnership model was based, above all, on unions' willingness to trade moderate pay rises for income tax reductions, and for commitments in the areas of public and social spending.

Any new deal would be quite different in combining pay concessions of one form or another, with increases in income tax, and reductions in public and social expenditure.

In this way, the basis of the social partnership will shift towards the kind of 'concession bargaining' commonly at the core of social pacts in European countries, but up to now largely unknown to Ireland's social partners.

Bill Roche is Professor of Industrial Relations and Human Resources at the School of Business, University College Dublin

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/wary-impact-took-steam-out-of-congress-action-plan-1686399.html