Andrew Hall
The national leadership of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), under Stephen Jones and Margaret Gillespie, was returned in the union's national officers elections held at the end of last year. It was one of the closet results ever, with opposition candidates winning nearly 50% of the primary vote for most of the seven national leadership positions.
The militant rank-and-file network Members First won 18-20% of the vote, and the newly formed CPSU Action team, a progressive split away from the incumbents, won 26-31%. Both opposition teams won some grassroots leadership positions and between them they won 14 positions on the 67-member national governing council of the union.
Members First activists aim to use their positions to help unite all members of the CPSU who want to actively resist the Howard government and employers' escalating attacks on trade unions, wages and working conditions, civil liberties and welfare, and to stop the sale of the remainder of Telstra.
Members First are now much more strongly placed, alongside CPSU Action and other union activists, to organise ongoing resistance and further strengthen the growing desire amongst CPSU members for a democratic, fighting union.
Once the federal Coalition's new industrial relations laws hit workplaces, including in the public sector, the CPSU leadership will have to fight or be completely sidelined. The national officers election results are a warning that they cannot take the membership for granted.
If the CPSU leaders go along with Howard's draconian laws (as they did in their decision last year to sanction only legal industrial action by union members, even though almost any action will now be illegal), the union will be in big strife.
Only by resisting Howard's attacks can the union increase its membership, restore members' willingness to be union delegates and turn around the passivity amongst the membership.
The historic 550,000-strong national day of protest against the new IR laws on November 15 involved many thousands of public servants and showed that there is a great willingness amongst them to take Howard on.
Fighting Howard's and the employers' anti-union, anti-worker project in a serious way — to defeat it, rather than just help the ALP get elected — is the main plank in the platform for rebuilding our union.
We need a public sector-wide campaign to defend the 10,000 Telstra jobs currently under the axe. We urgently need to build a campaign that brings together public servants, other workers and the wider community to defend any union that is attacked under Howard's IR or "anti-terror" laws, and any unionist who is fined or jailed for standing up to them.
We should also support the calls from other unions for more nationwide protest actions, including stoppages, when the new laws are proclaimed. And we need to campaign for industry (pattern) bargaining and against individual contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements). Agency bargaining (as opposed to industry bargaining) is a longstanding part of the government's divide and rule strategy in the workforce, one that will now be augmented by AWAs. Both need to be fought if we are to rebuild worker solidarity and achieve good wages and conditions across the whole public sector.
To be an effective union, members and especially the leaders will have to be prepared to defy Howard's laws, all of them. I and many others in Members First have pledged to go all the way, to jail if necessary, to defend CPSU members' democratic rights because we recognise that, under WorkChoices and the related legislation, we will simply not be able to save jobs, working conditions or our union unless we are prepared to be serious.
To get in touch with Members First, or to join the CPSU fight-back network, phone Andrew 0438 624744 or visit <http://www.members-first.org>.
[Andrew Hall was elected unopposed to the CPSU governing council and as secretary of the Electoral and Employment Regulation Section. He is a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Green Left Weekly, February 1, 2006.
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