BY SUE BOLTON
MELBOURNE — In a victory for militant unionism, the Members Reform Team, consisting of rank-and-file postal workers, has won control of the Victorian postal and telecommunications (P&T) branch of the communications division of the Communications, Electrical and Plumbing Union (CEPU).
The reform team won all the official positions except for branch president, and won six out of seven of the positions on the branch committee of management. The new leadership team will take office on August 1.
This victory has extra significance because, for decades, the postal union was controlled by the far-right National Civic Council, and since the collapse of the NCC, has been controlled by the right-wing faction of the Labor Party.
Newly elected P&T branch secretary Joan Doyle told Green Left Weekly that the Members Reform Team is the first left-wing leadership to be elected in the branch.
A postal delivery worker for 18 years, Doyle said: "After having been shop stewards and trying to protect conditions locally, we worked out that there was a fix in place, and that we'd never get anywhere until we got the union leadership off our backs. Instead of trying to fight the union and management, we might be able to fight management directly."
Doyle explained that as shop stewards, members of the reform team had repeatedly had the experience of negotiating agreements with local Australia Post managers to improve conditions and terms of employment for postal workers, only to have these agreements overturned behind their backs by union organisers.
The reform team launched its first serious challenge in 1997 when it won two-thirds of the vote among the postal workers. However, they were outnumbered on the branch management committee because the telecommunications and postal sections of the P&T branch had an equal number of representatives — even though the postal section had at least five times as many members as the telecommunications section. The telecommunications section covers Telstra linespeople.
The high vote for the militant reform team frightened the incumbents, so in election campaigns since 1997, the incumbents pumped massive amounts of money into their campaigns.
In this year's election, there were two teams of incumbent officials running, with some cross-ticketing. However, Doyle believes that even if the incumbents had run a united ticket, the reform team would still have won.
She described what the union was like under the old leadership: "The joke is that you ring the Australia Post phone number and that's the only place you'll find the organisers. The old leadership's approach was to ask Australia Post for something, and when management said no, the union would say 'okay'."
Under this style of unionism, rostered days off in Australia Post retail outlets were done away with and workers dealing with customers were not allowed to be seated. Mail sorters have had an unsafe sorting speed imposed on them, so they are now in a time and motion pressure cooker.
Since the election of the federal Coalition government in 1996, Australia Post has been on the warpath against its workers. "They've clearly been told to kick heads", said Doyle. "Now they're using things like the code of ethics, which is our disciplinary process, as an industrial tactic. Now people get coded [threatened with disciplinary action under the code of ethics] for anything so that [management] can build up a paper trail on you and then kick you out the door.
"Australia Post is coding drivers because they're late back, when they've actually been stuck in traffic and there's nothing they can do about it. They're coding posties who can't meet the sorting speed and get back on the time the computer says they should be on."
Australia Post has also privatised a lot of its operations. Doyle said that most people would be surprised at how few of the retail outlets are still owned by Australia Post. All of the parcel delivery service has been contracted out.
None of these moves were resisted by the old union leadership. "The union didn't even give the [parcel delivery] drivers a meeting to ask how many people wanted [redundancy] packages and how many people wanted to fight for their job."