Peter Cassells and the Future of Work

In May 2005, the Partnership Resource Centre was privileged to host Peter Cassells the Executive Chair of the Irish National Centre for Partnership and Performance. Peter is acknowledged in Ireland as one of the architects of the National Partnership Agreements that, since the early 1990s, have energized the Irish economy.

Peter spoke to a range of audiences while he was in New Zealand on the Irish experience of social partnership, the impact it has had on the Irish economy and workplaces and how they are using the partnership approach to deal with future issues facing Irish employers, unions and workplaces. Peter gave the key note address at the first Future of Work seminar hosted by the Department of Labour.

Future of Work seminar - 25 May 2005
Notes from presentation by Peter Cassells

People attribute Ireland's success to three things:

1. becoming part of the European Union
2. the tax system
3. government, employers and unions changing the way they worked on issues - away from an adversarial relationship to one of partnership.

In order to continue succeeding, the focus in Ireland is now on the workplace. Managing adaptation to change is the key issue. This focus is driven from the top by Ireland's Prime Minister. He has a vision.

How did Ireland do it, what are the tangibles?

The most important part was the PROCESS. There were very high levels of involvement from employers, unions and government departments (and not just the obvious ones).

The key is trying to raise everyone's shared understanding of the future 10 to 15 years out. It is about anticipating and adapting to change in both the private and the public sector. A series of conferences were held and it took 12 to18 months to complete the process. We also did an attitudinal survey - what employers and employees thought of the workplace of the future, what changes did they see?

Emphasis on process

Everything is very process driven and collaborative. It is important to understand that changes in view point happen through the process of discussion.

There was also acceptance that a great deal is going to be experimentation - learning as we go long. We don't know the answers to many issues due to the pace of change.

Vision

The vision was that all jobs in all sectors were going to be brought up one step. The assumption was that the knowledge content of all jobs will increase significantly. We didn't want some people to be left behind.

This is key to the vision.

We introduced a minimum wage equivalent to $15 per hour.

How do you make the vision real?

How would we know that we have achieved our vision?

We set a target that the average earnings for new jobs created is $70,000 p.a. A smaller number of new jobs would be created, but they would be better paid.

Ask the difficult questions

What does innovation mean?

What does transitioning to a knowledge-based economy mean?

What does lifelong learning mean?

What makes us different in New Zealand and how can we use this to our advantage?

Innovation

We moved away from an exclusively R&D focus. Innovation is important in all spheres including the delivery of public services.

We knew we had to link innovation and changes to job satisfaction and reduction in stress, not the opposite.

Developing our innovation and technology base depends as much on improving the ability of workplaces to change as it does on R&D.

Productivity is linked to involvement and participation - bringing your brain to work.

Early mover advantage

We were always looking for what would differentiate us in Ireland from others and whether we could get an early mover advantage.

We concluded that in the future, there will be huge pressure to adapt and change - people in Ireland are convinced they can crack fast adaptation to change.

Focus on the positive

Don't conceptualise issues as problems

Get out of sterile debate about employees' needs being costly. The workplace of the future will be highly dynamic around these issues - find ways of looking at them positively.

Changing workforce

Our time horizon was not too far out. We realised that 8/10 people currently working will still be working in 2015 in Ireland.

Future of service delivery

Customised, integrated, single entry.

Proactive diversity

Ireland has 30,000 immigrants per year. Companies and organisations that are proactively diverse will be the ones who can adapt to the future.

Notion of fairness is very important.

Questions:

You talked about workplaces being proactively diverse. Workplaces can look very different but behave the same. Can you expand on this more?

Diversity of ideas is very important. Men look at things in a particular way, women may see them differently. Different nationalities have different approaches to issues; partnership process, problem solving.

Employers were asked whether the underlying culture can be actively used in the work of the future. The key conclusion employers came to was that it gave them the opportunity to be much more creative. In a full employment country employers are so dependant on employees that they can't afford to command and control and say 'go somewhere else if you don't like it'.

What are the lessons for public sector managers in terms of workplace change?

These revolve around teamwork, customised service, flexible reward systems.

What is difficult to manage is the relationship between Ministers and public sector managers - there is an inevitable tension.

The Irish public sector is still very centralised. In one way this makes it easier to change but in another way it is more rigid.

We are asking ourselves the following questions: How do we get flexibility with the need for uniformity across the system? How do we open it up but not lose? Do you get more changes by separating policy from delivery?

There have been a lot of initiatives in New Zealand around partnership, rather than one overarching one. Does this matter? How do you keep people involved? How do you deal with the question of employers and the legitimacy of the state getting involved in these issues?

An overarching initiative was very important for Ireland. Getting a shared understanding was as important as anything else.

Role of the state

In Ireland it was assumed that government would be involved. We jointly set our priorities and then set out what government should do. There was some scepticism about whether government should be funding any of this. The answer was that if government is funding R&D then it should be funding this.

It was about trying to take best practice and transferring it from one place to another. What was the role of unions?

Who represented non union employees?

How did union members feel about negotiating benefits that would be passed on to non union members?

In Ireland 80% of the workforce is unionised. There is general of unions. In the private sector only ¼ of employees are unionised. Part of the reason for this is that a lot of the companies in Ireland are from the US. Also, the services sector has ballooned and many of these companies employ less than 10 people.

There isn't a tension between non union and union. Nobody says 'Is this going to apply to the non unionised employees?' It is assumed. Workplace issues should not be approached it in the 'how many battalions do I have' way. If you can achieve consensus, don't ask too many questions.

Equity is part of your vision. What direction are you moving in respect of equity?

Ireland is small, and there is a high level of cohesion. There is always a lot of debate about whether if we have any more growth; everything is going to self destruct. It is a largely egalitarian society so there are no quibbles about a high minimum wage. In Ireland our political process is centrist. We don't really have a neo liberal party or much on the far left.

A huge amount of work has gone in to tackling long term unemployment using area-based strategies. Our long term unemployment is at 2%.

In terms of male/female earnings there was a significant closing of the gap but this has now plateaued. Women now earn on average 85% of what men earn.

There is a return to the debate about types of jobs and insufficient value being placed on certain jobs, e.g. carers. This needs to be engaged on in partnership.

James Buwalda - closing comments

The interest in workplace issues is rich in New Zealand. We are currently canvassing issues and the partnership process through this forum and series of Future of Work seminars. The way we see the 'whole' of these issues is important.