Professor Terrence McDonough:

We could probably deal with this fundamentally by looking at the outcome in terms of labour's share in national income. I suppose what we could do is contrast it, on the one hand, with the fact that Irish wages did not stagnate in the same way that they did in the United States. On the other hand, if one looks at labour's share of national income, labour's share of national income around 1980 was about 71%, that is, of everything produced in Ireland, 71% of it went to the working class or those represented by the labour movement. By 2002, that figure was down to around 45%. While labour succeeded in preventing an outright stagnation of wages, labour's relative weight in the economy, especially in terms of its income, declined quite drastically. If one looks at labour density, that is, what percentage of the workforce is represented by unions, that dropped rather precipitously. It has been halved, essentially, over the course of social partnership.