BY PAUL OBOOHOV
CANBERRA — The Community and Public Sector Union branch conference here on July 26 voted to support centralised bargaining for wages and "core conditions" in the federal public service. It accepted the need for "some flexibility" on agency (enterprise) bargaining. The resolution, moved by ACT branch secretary Graham Rodda, included a critique of agency bargaining.
A motion from the Members First rank and file group was lost by 14 votes to 17. It called for a centralised award and no agency bargaining, a start to negotiations following the federal election, as well as a members meeting in the ACT. Rodda argued that it was premature for the CPSU to campaign against agency bargaining because it was not clear that members wanted that. There had only been two weeks for debate and in the Centrelink national office the debate had been suppressed by ALP-aligned delegates.
After five years of agency bargaining in the federal public service, the CPSU's ALP-aligned national leadership has admitted that there is a 15% variation in annual pay rates across agencies. There are variations in conditions as well; some have been bargained away.
The ACT branch conference's resolution is the first crack in the leadership's support for agency bargaining, and reflects the support in the ranks for a return to public sector-wide campaigns.
It is a measure of the consistent work by Members First over the last five years that the ACT Branch secretary felt obliged to acknowledge the growing rank and file sentiment in his motion.
In the early 1990s, the ALP federal government included enterprise/agency bargaining as a principle in the annual national wage cases. This followed pressure from the Business Council of Australia (BCA), representing the biggest corporations. The Australian Council of Trade Unions, instead of taking an independent position, stepped into line behind the BCA and the government.
The pro-ALP national CPSU leadership began to accept full agency bargaining with their move to an agency-based section structure at the end of 1996. At this time, a national campaign had been initiated for a service-wide agreement on pay and conditions, as had been done in the past. In the first half of 1997, several mass meetings were called as part of this campaign.
However, as the Coalition's federal industrial relations minister Peter Reith opposed such an agreement and pushed for agency bargaining, the motions that came from the national officials to the mass meetings had fine rhetoric but hardly any action component. Members interpreted these for what they were, and the numbers at the mass meetings dwindled. This pseudo campaign conveniently occurred just before elections for national CPSU officials in May 1997. A month or so later, Caird put the proposal for agency bargaining to meetings around the country. The ACT meeting voted against, and the Melbourne meeting almost did.
However, the ALP has now felt the need to pay lip service to the harm that agency bargaining has done to public servants. Labor is keen to win the votes of government employees in the next election. On March 22, Labor Senator John Faulkner stated that a federal Labor government would have a service-wide framework agreement that would include "broad standards", but allow for "a level of flexibility" for agency bargaining over pay and conditions. The Department of Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business would advise the "balance of interests" between the two.
In other words, the ALP has chosen to have two bob each way.
Recently, the Labor ALP opposition in the ACT and the ACT Trades and Labor Council agreed that agency bargaining would be minimised if the ALP becomes the next ACT government. This still allows for some level of agency bargaining. The ALP is stitching up deals with the union movement to allow agency bargaining to survive in some form.
A month ago, CPSU national secretary Wendy Caird released a discussion paper, partly as a way of positioning the union for a possible federal Labor government. The paper put the pros and cons of both centralised and agency bargaining, arguing that the latter had brought the rank and file into action since the demobilising experience of the Accord. The position advocated by the paper on bargaining did not go beyond Faulkner's position, and neither does the motion passed by ACT branch conference, except insofar as it suggests that pay and "core conditions" be part of centralised bargaining.
With the union officials desperately attempting to turn around a consistent trend of members leaving the union, in the absence of industrial campaigns on major national issues, the straw being clutched here is the chimera that agency bargaining leads to recruitment. While some agency bargaining industrial campaigns, where run, have led to minor rises in recruitment, they have not bucked the trend. Organisers have been taken off servicing members in favour of a massive ongoing recruitment drive, that seems to have levelled off the falling trend.
The fact that the ALP, from the likely next minister for the public service to the national and state officials of the CPSU, is accepting that there needs to be a level of centralised bargaining is a vindication of the stand taken over the last five years by Members First. It also is also a grudging admission that the ALP got it wrong on agency bargaining.