BY LEON PARISSI
SYDNEY — The fight to save 1000 NSW public service education support jobs in the schools and TAFE colleges is entering a critical phase. The state Labor government's deadline for filling the new organisational structures is early November.
NSW education minister Andrew Refshauge announced the restructure and job cuts program on June 17. Since then, under threat of industrial action, management has made some concessions to union demands for a fair and equitable plan for allocating the reduced number of jobs.
Union delegates are convinced that much more needs to be done before the NSW Public Service Association should concede the deletion of any jobs or the filling of any positions.
This round of job cuts is a means of government funding part of its employees' salaries award. The PSA signed off on the present award, which grants salary increases worth 16% over 4.5 years (finishing in June 2004) with 6% of the increase not funded by the NSW treasury. Departments and agencies were forced to find this amount within their own budgets. Job cuts became inevitable.
In defending its support for this pay deal, the PSA leadership argued that, in the first instance, it didn't agree to any job losses and, secondly, if jobs became threatened there would be a fight with the government. Now that the jobs are threatened, union delegates are organising the campaign to protect jobs.
The most important issue now is for union delegates to find a way to successfully challenge the usual practice in the PSA leadership of allowing the "right" of managers to manage, particularly their "right" to decide employment levels.
In the past, when organisational restructures have happened and jobs have been lost, the guiding principle of opposing job losses has been submerged in the struggle to force a fair process for placing, retraining and redeploying the employees who remain and to see off those who go with as big a separation package as can be negotiated.
While past PSA leaderships have opposed job cuts, there have been few strong industrial fights to defeat job loss programs. Further, while the position of the union is that when a job is deleted the work of that job must also be deleted, that is not what happens in the main. Most of the work of deleted positions is left for others to pick up. This has happened time and time again over the past 10 years.
To challenge this practice (called "productivity savings" by the bosses) is a difficult process but one which must be met.
[Leon Parissi is secretary of the NSW Public Service Association TAFE delegates committee and a PSA central councillor. He is a member of Workers Liberty and the Socialist Alliance. This article is written in a personal capacity.]
From Green Left Weekly, October 22, 2003.
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