Successful but unappealing: fifteen years of workplace partnership in Ireland

Abstract

This paper presents the first comprehensive review and assessment of Ireland's influential 15-year experiment with workplace partnership. The paper reviews the outcomes of workplace partnership and explains the limited adoption of partnership in the private and public sectors, drawing on the authors' experiences as participants in policy initiatives concerned with promoting partnership in the workplace. Although the promotion of partnership was to the fore in public policy between the late 1990s to the onset of the recession and successful outcomes were reported for the main stakeholders where partnerships were established, the paper explains why the concept nevertheless remained largely unappealing across the private and public sectors.

Keywords::

• direct involvement
• partnership outcomes
• stakeholders
• workplace partnership

Notes

^1. Latent class modelling of data on partnership collected in 1993 also revealed a virtually random pattern of diffusion of partnership practices, with little evidence of any clearly defined or cohesive models of widespread currency (see Roche 2008).

^2. Unfortunately, the archived NCPP 2009 survey data-set does not permit a comparison with the data for 2003 presented in Table 1.

^3. Although the statistical associations between outcomes and partnership, involvement and cognate areas (e.g. ‘shared governance’) draw heavily on indices measuring the latter types of activities, few details of how the indices were constructed are given in the study.

^4. As the authors themselves acknowledge, the survey was conducted among members of a trade union hostile towards national social partnership agreements, if not so unambiguously so towards partnership at the workplace (D'Art and Turner 2002).

^5. Roche was a member of the Advisory Committee of the Unit on Partnership in the Enterprise, established by the Fianna Fail-Labour Coalition Government in 1993. He was retained by the NESC in 1996 (with Tom Kochan) to report on strategies for extending partnership to enterprise and workplace levels. In the same year, he was retained by IBEC to report on the experiences of leading companies with partnership and involvement. In 1996, he was commissioned by the Labour Relations Commission to advise on the development of the Commission's strategy. In 1998, he was appointed a member of the Liaison Committee of the National Centre for Partnership. In 2001, he was engaged by the recently re-established NCPP to advise on the development of the agency's first strategy document. He was subsequently appointed by the Government to the Council of the NCPP and chair of its Research Advisory Committee. In 2003, he drafted the background conceptual paper for the NCPP on the Forum on the Workplace of the Future and chaired a group tasked with developing a scoping paper for the work of the Forum. In 1996, he was commissioned by the Department of Enterprise to lead a research team conducting an assessment of partnership in Aer Rianta, and was subsequently appointed a member of the Joint Union Company Group overseeing the Aer Rianta partnership initiative. Apart from his many papers on workplace partnership in Ireland, Paul Teague was involved in the evaluation of progress with workplace partnership and of the role of the NCP, commissioned in 1999 by the Department of the Taoiseach. The subsequent report led to the establishment of the NCPP in 2001.

^6. The ‘Forum Scoping Group’, which comprised academics, researchers and staff members of the NCPP, was chaired by Roche. The draft scoping paper presented an unvarnished analysis of the labour market, work and institutions. The basis of employers’ or other parties’ objections to the document was not made clear. A request by the chair, on behalf of the Scoping Group, that specific objections should be outlined and that the Group should be allowed to consider revisions in their light, in accordance with standard practice, was met with the response that the document was being ‘interred’.