Employers are prepared to enter talks on a new social partnership deal but many will require a pay pause as part of the outcome, their representative body said yesterday.
The Irish Business and Employers' Confederation (IBEC) said that if pay increases in low single figures cannot be agreed, it will reject a national deal and return to local bargaining.
Pay increases at least in line with inflation will be a key demand of the trade union movement, which decides today whether to enter talks.
A new agreement, if one can be reached, would succeed the Programme for Prosperity and Fairness, which runs until the end of the year.
In a document to be published today outlining its vision for social partnership beyond 2002, IBEC says that wage growth chasing inflation is self-defeating and "the cycle must be broken now".
Members, it says, will only contemplate a new agreement if pay rises in line with EU competitor countries can be agreed.
However, Mr Brendan McGinty, IBEC's director of human resources, said that for some employers even low, single-figure pay increases "would simply be a bridge too far".
Textiles, engineering and printing were among the sectors where a pay pause was likely to be sought, he said.
IBEC's position going into the talks is that social partnership has served the country well since the first deal was agreed in 1987, but the PFP was not a good experience for employers.
The partnership process, it claims, has been "suffering from fatigue".
It has "lost focus, its structures are too complex and bureaucracy overburdens it".
The non-pay targets in the PFP, it says, were unrealistic in their detail, while the pay aspects were effectively binding on employers only.
Mr McGinty said that flexibility in work practices was supposed to be a part of the PFP.
However, wherever such flexibility was introduced, unions continued to seek pay rises over and above the terms of the agreement.
IBEC says that a new model will be needed if it is to sign up to an agreement.
The competitiveness, of Irish firms has, it says, been "completely eroded" in the recent past and "must be restored to centre stage" in any new deal.
A successor to the PFP will have to include more effective recognition of commercial difficulties, renewed commitments to change and flexibility at local level and improved industrial relations procedures to deal with non-compliance, it argues.
The document also accuses trade unions of failing to engage in talks, supposed to have taken place under the PFP, to address the problem of industrial disputes in the public sector.
