By Peter Perry
SYDNEY — On July 13 CityRail cleaning staff at Sydney Terminal and several other depots were called together an hour before "knockoff" to hear management's announcement that their jobs had been privately contracted. Many stood heads bowed, but not surprised that finally the finger of fate had been pointed in their direction.
(In the mid-1980s the State Rail Authority (SRA) employed around 36,000 people. Today, "rationalisation" has reduced that total down to approximately 12,000 with talk of "downsizing" to a final figure of about 7000 within five years.)
In the present climate there are no votes for the state government or the ALP opposition in saving a few hundred cleaning jobs in the SRA. CityRail cite that they will save around $5 million a year if trains and offices are cleaned "professionally".
"We value your contribution to CityRail and there is no personal blame attached to our decision. It is a matter of letting specialists manage a specialised business. It is the direction many public and private sector organisations are taking." Such was CityRail's unfathomable public relations logic.
What choices did management offer the cleaners?
- 1: Apply for another job inside the State Rail Authority.
- 2: Work for the new contractor but remain a State Rail employee for the first 12 months, with the normal award conditions applying only for that time.
- 3: Voluntary redundancy.
Management also stated that the Australian Services Union and the Public Transport Union (PTU) had been advised and that they were prepared to "continue discussions on an ongoing basis".
Senior union representatives claimed CityRail was breaking a memorandum of understanding that there would be no staff reviews without consultation. This claim was revealed as worthless in the eyes of the meeting when management revealed that the PTU executive had approved the privatisation move. In fact, a parallel meeting was taking place at that moment with NSW PTU secretary Harold Dwyer!
Within a few days the reality of the choices facing many of the workers (who are mainly from non-English speaking backgrounds) turned fatalism into anger. Small, informal workplace meetings reinforced many of the workers' view that they had nothing to lose from initiating militant action.
This anger boiled over at a stopwork meeting held at Sydney Terminal on July 26. PTU president George Webb had come to the meeting without any firm proposals. His opening sentence was that he "thought that this meeting was unnecessary and premature". But the workers had come expecting to support a call to action; after all, what was there to negotiate?
All that the union offered was to meet with the SRA several days before the previously declared deadline for the signing of redundancy documents. To the cleaners this was too little too late. One after another the workers attacked the record of the union over the privatisation issue.
Webb blamed "those people who had voted for the Liberal Party" and reminded the workers that they should vote for Labor at the next state election. This threw the workers into absolute outrage as it did not solve their immediate problem. Most workers had no illusions about the ALP's abilities, as many had been redeployed from other jobs in the SRA by the 1976-1988 Wran-Unsworth ALP government.
The "cynical" workers were accused of having no solidarity with the union. They didn't disagree. One worker produced a document which he had obtained from the government interpreter service. He claimed it showed that the PTU had prior knowledge of the privatisation at Sydney Terminal, despite the union's protestations to the contrary.
As I write, despondency again rules the workplace. The workers know that leadership from their paid union representatives is non-existent.
Contract cleaners in other sections are paid a miserly $6.50 per hour, get five sick days per year, have no travel pass or are paid casual piecework rates according to how many jobs they do. This compares with present conditions with the SRA which are nearly twice as good as these.
While prospects look grim there is the realisation that a democratic union has to be built from the ground up, prepared to act in a coordinated way with the other sections of the same union and those outside it. After all, despite the years of attrition and inaction, the problem for PTU members is not the lack of industrial strength; it is the straitjacket imposed through the union's links with the pro-business, pro-restructuring pro-privatisation ALP.