Background to the Research

• Industrial relations in the South of Ireland followed the British 'voluntary' model in the first 50 years of independence. Since the 1970s the South has gradually moved away from this model. The two themes in industrial relations in Northern Ireland have been the extent of integration into the wider UK system and Catholic labour market disadvantage and fair employment policy.
  

Research Approach

• The authors explore the key aspects of industrial relations in the North and South through the use of official data and secondary sources. They also carried out in-depth interviews with 102 organisations in the electronics, financial services and food, drink and tobacco sectors of the Southern economy, in order to argue that change has taken place in both systems of industrial relations and to identify the nature of that change.
  

Main Findings

Contemporary Irish Industrial Relations

• The hallmark of the new consensual industrial relations is the national pay agreements, for some these signify the end of voluntarism in the South and herald a move to a more European model of labour market management.
• National pay agreements have held down wages in Ireland's tradeable sector. They have also converged with the country's macro-economic strategy as the South sought to meet the criteria for monetary union.
• The constraint on private sector pay was not replicated in the public sector. Throughout the 1990s, employees in the public sector have received annual wage increases above inflation and those in senior positions have also benefited from pay rising through regular comparability assessments.
• National pay agreements have also focused on redistribution without regard to the production side of the economy. There are weak links between national pay deals and the employment practices of enterprises.
• National pay agreements have been an important factor in economic recovery and the theme of partnership between trade unions, employers and other interested parties seems to be at the centre of all government programmes.

Enterprise-Level Employment Systems in Ireland (the survey results)

• Only about one-in-four enterprises adopted team-working as a workplace innovation. 56.9% of companies had introduced job rotation to some of their core workers, but only 38.2% had done so at the 50% level. This result may show that firms use job rotation as much to remove job demarcation as to enhance multi-skilling or multi-tasking.
• TQM was the most common employment innovation by firms, with about 70% of the sample using this practice in some form. In many cases TQM mainly involved a company-wide ethos rather than large-scale changes to work organisations.
• Overall the survey results would suggest that whilst there has been a move away from the voluntarist model, no new coherent system is emerging. Rather there exists an open-ended co-ordination arrangement, with the industrial relations centre playing a key role (especially in relation to wages) and ground-level employment systems fairly fragmented.

Industrial Relations in Northern Ireland

The Religious Divide

• Catholic males are more than twice as likely as Protestant males to be unemployed. Protestants are over-represented in professional, managerial and skilled occupations and Catholics are over-represented in semi-skilled and unskilled jobs. Catholics are massively under-represented in security-related jobs. Catholic women are under-represented in administrative and managerial employment and in clerical, sales and secretarial jobs and over-represented in professional jobs. Economic inequality within each religious bloc has increased.
• The Trade Unions in the North have consistently voiced their opposition to sectarianism and religious bigotry.
• One explanation of Catholic exclusion from the labour market is that Catholics were systematically excluded and another is that there were associations between the Protestant community and certain types of employment. Various industrial relations practices coupled with other social processes served to polarise the occupational structure of the North along religious lines.
• Economic change is eroding the deep religious schisms in the Northern Ireland labour market.
• The 'chill factor' may account to some degree for the existence of a relatively large number of private firms with mainly Catholic or Protestant employees. Another explanation is the growing residential segregation of the two communities. There appears to be a virtual exodus of Protestants from border areas, and in many residential areas a more pronounced clustering of the Catholic community has taken place.
• Whilst employers did discriminate against Catholics (and Protestants), and Protestant workers operated in ways that intimidated Catholics from particular firms, the more influential factor was probably industrial relations practices which had the unintended effect of grouping Catholics at the lower end of the labour market.

Fair Employment

• Fair employment legislation was introduced in 1976. However, it was not until the law was revised in 1989 that an effective anti-discrimination regime emerged in the labour market.
• Since the strengthening of fair employment legislation the proportion of Catholic men and women in the workforce has increased in almost every occupational grouping.
• Data from the three-yearly reviews of companies carried out by employers shows that the majority of them have adopted at least some of the soft fair-employment policies in the Code of Practice. 89% of employers have a written equal opportunity policy and the same proportion have a 'flags and emblem' policy, whilst 85% have made discrimination and harassment a disciplinary offence.
• A greater degree of formality has been introduced in relation to recruitment, particularly in management jobs.
• A few large private sector employers and certain public sector organisations have adopted radical human resource innovations in order to secure a more religiously balanced workforce.
• Industrial relations take place in a society where inclusive citizenship has yet to be established despite many social and economic changes.

Regional or British Industrial Relations

• The North has a more developed institutional architecture for industrial relations than any other regions of the UK. This includes the Labour Relations Agency, the only regional Equal Opportunity Commission in the UK and the relatively autonomous Training and Employment Agency.
• The strong anti-corporatist stance of successive Conservative governments was not actively pursued in the North - local trade unions and employers still have input into government decision making.
• There exists a lack of co-ordination between industrial relations institutions and an absence of innovatory, regionally specific, industrial relations policies.
• Many of the legal rights and obligations governing the workplace were set by Westminster and collective bargaining has been fully incorporated into the British system.
• Workers in the public sector have been exposed to the same processes of contracting out and the introduction of quasi-markets as their British counterparts.
• The collapse of pay bargaining in the private sector in the UK during the 1980s also affected Northern Ireland - virtually no private sector employees in the North are now covered by national collective bargaining deals. Furthermore, private sector wages in the north, which had been gradually converging with the UK average from the early 1970s began, from the mid-1980s, to diverge.
• The rise of the flexible labour market has raised anxiety that the local economy is a place of low wage and unskilled jobs. The introduction of the minimum wage is one method of upgrading wage levels in the private sector and would have a greater impact on the North because of the already low level of private sector wages in the region.

Conclusions

• The frequency of strikes and industrial disputes is declining in both the economies of the North and South.
• The South has a national system of industrial relations where the North has a regional one. This has implications for pay bargaining, wider economic objectives and the incentives/constraints that can be created by industrial relations institutions.
• The South has a stable political democracy and the North has not. Political legitimacy is absent in the North and industrial relations operate within the context of unstable governance and a lack of inclusive citizenship.
• Globalisation and European integration have not eradicated the importance of borders. National systems of industrial relations are still important and influential in the economic and social order of states.
• Continued diversity in economic and social life has important implications for any strategy premised on North-South economic cooperation. Because each region's base for industrial relations is different, programmes to bring the two economies together may not succeed.
• The two systems of industrial relations in Ireland are linked to contrasting models of economic and social citizenship. Without major constitutional change, low level, ad hoc connections between the two regions seems possible.