By Paul Oboohov
On February 26 the Australian Industrial Relations Commission (AIRC) granted an award to Employment National Administration (ENA) that extinguishes almost all hope of its 912 former Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) workers ever regaining public service working conditions.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) argued unsuccessfully that Employment National (EN), which sub-contracts ENA, is a fully government-owned business that has taken over the business of the CES and that, under a loophole in the Workplace Relations Act, the Australian Public Service Award should automatically transmit to the new business.
EN argued that it is not an employer, and ENA argued that it couldn't be hamstrung by public service conditions in a commercial environment. The federal government backed ENA, and the AIRC agreed with them both.
The decision immediately destroyed the public service conditions of work of 245 ENA staff who are casual and temporary or had not gone onto individual contracts. The conditions include a 36.75-hour week, paid maternity leave, relatively generous long-service leave provisions and 48 weeks' redundancy pay.
The mostly ex-CES workers whose individual contracts are to be renewed in two years' time also face problems, since the award is much worse than their contracts. The new award has no paid maternity leave, reduced long-service and redundancy entitlements (the latter from 48 to eight weeks' pay), and a 38-hour week. The decision ratified the lowest standard of working conditions as the status quo in ENA.
This defeat for the CPSU follows the forced signing of individual contracts by CPSU members and other former CES staff. When the government "replaced" the CES with the flawed Job Network, EN and ENA as government-owned corporations operating in a fully privatised employment assistance market, these workers followed their jobs rather than joining the dole queue.
With the establishment of EN/ENA, another slab of the public service has been privatised the workers' conditions crushed. ENA and the government's success in the AIRC gives the green light to similar moves in other areas of the public service.
How was this allowed to happen? In 1996, when the government announced it was going to close the CES, the ALP-aligned national leadership of the CPSU, headed by Wendy Caird, was already moving to capitulate to a government demand to limit enterprise bargaining to individual departments. The union leaders insisted that any struggle over the CES would be limited to the CES, or at most the rest of the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs. They vehemently rejected the alternative — that the whole union fight the government's attacks.
The Caird leadership at first told the CES workers that parliament would save them. However, facing Senate attempts to water down its CES privatisation bill, the government privatised the CES administratively and the parliamentary road to saving the CES petered out.
Then, when the CES closure was definitely going ahead, the CPSU national leadership told CES workers it would follow them into the private sector and ensure public service conditions. The latest AIRC decision has closed off this option.
The CES disaster did not have to occur. As the Maritime Union and Australian Dyeing Company struggles have shown, determined action to defend workers' rights by the unions involved, with solidarity from other unions and the wider community, can turn back employer and government attacks.