More rhetoric than reality: enterprise level industrial relations partnerships in Ireland

Abstract

Since 1987 Ireland has had a sequence of centralised agreements on pay and other aspects of economic and social policy negotiated between the "social partners". A criticism of this period is the failure to extend the partnership approach to the level of the enterprise. This paper considers the reasons why enterprise level partnerships have now emerged as a significant debate in Irish industrial relations and reviews recent position papers and research evidence on the nature and extent of such partnerships. The paper concludes that despite a decade of national "partnership" agreements, there is little evidence of any significant uptake of employer-labour partnerships at enterprise level.