Wages and working conditions were set in sector-wide negotiations that allowed individual firms little scope for variation, tying employers' hands.
The agreement could boost wider negotiations over Tehran's atomic program.
Another round of wider negotiations followed, not much more public than the last.
As of Tuesday, that bill had not been passed, since it is mired in wider negotiations over provincial elections.
But the issue is likely to be included in wider negotiations over the euro, said one diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity.
This should give it a unique place in the wider negotiations, and the UK could take advantage of science as a point of agreement in more difficult discussions.
But the new British government, like its predecessor, ignores loyalist transgressions to make wider negotiations possible, and because the nationalist and non-sectarian parties in the talks regard their spokesmen so highly.
Critics, particularly in Brazil, say they fear that this regional agreement is an attempt by the United States to divide and rule, forcing the bigger Latin nations to accept Washington's dictates in the wider negotiations.
The Sunday Times, citing leaked correspondence between Justice Secretary Jack Straw and his Scottish counterpart, Kenny MacAskill, said the decision was made as "wider negotiations" with the government of Libya continued.
Last year's Lib Dem conference under the leadership of the Treasury chief secretary, Danny Alexander, overwhelmingly backed the setting of a decarbonisation target, but the energy secretary, Ed Davey, was forced to defer the proposal as part of his wider negotiations over green energy, including a £7.6bn-per-year Treasury commitment to provide green subsidies.
An earlier attempt to reach a truce 24 hours earlier, which had envisaged a lull in hostilities leading to wider negotiations over key issues, including a lifting of the Israeli blockade of the coastal strip, fell apart because of internal opposition on both sides.
