Terry Costello
& Sue Bolton, Melbourne
The Community and Public Sector Union's national leadership has responded to the new political environment of increased attacks on unions by battening down the hatches and reinforcing the bunker.
At its national council meeting in Sydney on March 18-20, the CPSU leadership voted to respond to the federal Coalition government's anti-union legislation with an "information campaign".
In ACTU secretary Greg Combet's address to the national council on March 18, he said that the focus of the union movement's response to the Howard government's planned anti-union legislation would be to wage a public relations campaign and form "an alliance with the state governments". When asked about using mass industrial action to stop the anti-union laws, Combet responded that he never made comments about industrial action and that the ACTU is "not reckless and doesn't do silly things".
CPSU assistant national secretary Margaret Gillespie told the councillors that the union leadership planned to combat the new laws restricting unions' right to enter workplaces by phoning and emailing workplace delegates at home.
When CPSU national secretary Adrian O'Connell was asked if he supported the Victorian Trades Hall Council mass delegates' meeting on March 23 and the call for a half-day stoppage and protest on June 30, he responded that he opposed these actions on the grounds that unions have allegedly lost their institutional power. O'Connell added that if unions rely on protesting against the Howard government with rallies, they'll be left with no alternative response when the anti-union laws are introduced.
The main debate at the national council was over a new set of rules which further centralises power in a small group of full-time CPSU officials.
The national councillors were only informed that the national council would be voting on a totally new set of rules a few weeks before the meeting.
Despite the fact that the new rules will have a radical impact on the accountability of full-time national officials, the national councillors only received a copy of the new draft rules on the second day of the meeting, and had to submit amendments by 1 pm on the same day.
The new rules were adopted despite the presentation of an open letter from 265 CPSU members calling for them to be voted on by a plebiscite of all members. The motion for the plebiscite was ruled to be in conflict with the motion to adopt the rules. When the rules were passed the motion for a plebiscite lapsed.
Despite the CPSU making a photocopier available to circulate amendments to motions during the national council meeting, use of the photocopier was denied when a request was made for extra copies of the open letter.
The open letter was initiated by Members First — a group of CPSU members who want to see a more democratic and more activist CPSU.
New rules
Some elements of democratic functioning which existed under the previous rules have been dropped from the new set of rules. For example, under the previous rules, section councils (e.g. Centrelink section council or Telstra section council) could vote to direct their representatives to national council how to vote on particular issues. This has been dropped from the new rules.
During the debate on this, national councillors were told that the views of the CPSU leadership were more important than the views of rank-and-file members from a section council.
One of the new rules defines the role of delegates as being to "carry out any lawful task authorised by the union". With the Howard government about to make many union activities — including the right of unions to enter workplaces more than twice a year — unlawful, it is extremely dangerous for a union to specify that delegates only engage in lawful action in its rules.
The only point of specifying this is to absolve the union's full-time officials of all responsibility if a delegate needs to undertake legitimate union activity that is deemed unlawful by the federal government — for example, calling an "unlawful" stop-work meeting. Under the new rules, such a delegate would be left to fend for themselves, without the support of the union leadership.
New structure
The most significant rule change reduced the number of full-time elected officials from 19 to 10. Under the old rules, only the national secretary, assistant national secretary, national president and deputy national president were elected by all CPSU members. The other full-time positions were division secretaries who were elected by union members in their division, and regional (state) secretaries, who were elected by members of their regions.
Under the new rules, there won't be any full-time regional secretaries. This finishes the process begun by the CPSU leadership to abolish state branches and instead organise solely by sections.
The 10 new full-time positions will comprise the national secretary, assistant national secretary and the national president plus seven others who would be assigned to particular divisions by the national secretary.
Under the old rules, division secretaries were elected by union members in their division and there was some accountability of those division secretaries to members of their division. Division secretaries under the new rules, are accountable to the national secretary, but not to members of their division.
However, a rebellion by members of the ABC section in the lead-up to the national council meant that the ABC and CSIRO sections will be the only ones with full-time section secretaries elected by members of those sections.
Instead of promoting activism in workplaces, these rule changes will make it harder for the views of rank-and-file members to prevail at the top echelons of the CPSU hierarchy.
O'Connell gave three main reasons for the new structure: to separate "governance" from "operations"; the need for a "whole of union approach"; and the need for flexible deployment of resources.
However, O'Connell's justification that the union needed a "whole of union approach" is hypocritical when the union leadership has consistently opposed any return to bargaining across the entire Australian Public Service. In 1992, the CPSU leadership pushed through a decision for union agreements to be negotiated separately with the management of each government agency instead of the previous approach of negotiating agreements across the entire public service.
At this national council meeting, another motion for a return to bargaining across the entire public service was rejected.
Not only does the CPSU leadership oppose public service-wide bargaining, but the leadership actively opposes any joint campaigns by different sections of the union, even though different sections are campaigning over the same issues, for example, against the introduction of Australian Workplace Agreements.
A motion to disaffiliate from the NSW branch of the ALP from July 1, 2005, was overwhelmingly passed. However, the argument used to justify disaffiliation was that the union needed to be independent from all political parties. The motion wasn't argued on the basis of NSW Labor having carried out anti-worker policies, and there was no proposal to look towards a more pro-worker alternative to the Labor Party. The CPSU pays $34,000 to the NSW ALP each year.
Motions to support refugees and to call for an end to the occupation of Iraq lapsed due to lack of time.
Elections are to be held in the CPSU later this year and in early 2006, These elections are shaping up as being a referendum on a hasty and ill-considered restructure that instead of building a capacity to win, threatens to make the CPSU leadership even more remote and insular from the membership than it already is.
[Terry Costello is CPSU telecommunications section secretary and a CPSU national councillor. Sue Bolton is a national co-convener of the Socialist Alliance's national trade union coordinating committee.]
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From Green Left Weekly, April 13, 2005.
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