By Leslie Williams
CANBERRA — Community and Public Sector Union members around the country met last week to vote on an initial union response to the federal government's attacks.
Public sector workers are losing jobs, suffering budget cuts and seeing offices close. The new government is attempting to ensure an irreversible destruction of the public sector. Services will be reduced or cut, and the only remaining role for public servants will be providing a bare minimum of infrastructure to allow big business to be most profitable.
Regional mass meetings were convened by the ACT branch to consider a National Executive motion on Howard's attacks. The motion was characterised by "parenthood" statements and a complete lack of action to defend jobs and services, calling instead for the government to tell the union how many jobs it plans to cut and when, so that the NE can report this back to members within a fortnight.
The ACT branch executive also proposed two supplementary motions at all five meetings. These added to the NE motion and called for industrial bans and a broader community campaign in defence of the public sector.
The general view of the meetings was that the NE motion was inadequate and didn't provide for any sort of a campaign or defence of jobs. Members were angry with the reasoning given for the NE's lack of action: that many CPSU members would have voted for the Howard government and therefore he has a mandate! Further, the NE didn't feel that public servants were up to a fight.
This view angered many members and was reflected in the vote — the NE motion was endorsed by members at a rate of only 2:1 across the ACT, with the branch executive's supplementary motions receiving overwhelming support.
Of particular note was the call for the CPSU to forge links with a broad range of unions and community organisations in defence of the public sector as a whole, in recognition that attacks on public sector workers are also attacks on indigenous peoples, the unemployed or underemployed, disabled, migrants, women and children — we will all suffer as a result of Howard's cuts.
At two of the ACT meetings, an additional motion was put calling for immediate mobilisations to protect jobs and stop the cuts. At the two meetings where this motion was put, it received overwhelming support. The 500-strong Woden meeting, where members who had already lost jobs were present, rejected the NE motion out of hand before going on to support the supplementary and additional motions.
The view was expressed strongly by members that it is the National Executive — not the rank and file membership — which is incapable of coordinating a strong industrial campaign, particularly following the Accord years, throughout which the role of the union bureaucracy was to stifle any form of industrial action and democratic participation.
The National Executive met on May 1 to consider the responses from the mass meetings. It called for branch-wide stop-work meetings on May 8 and 9 in all states to consider a further motion; this calls only for meetings to consider a 24-hour stop-work if the government attempts to implement involuntary redundancies.
This next round of meetings will, however, provide an opportunity for the state branches to adopt bans or other actions giving effect to the national motion.
For a genuine industrial campaign to develop and succeed, a whole generation of workers who know only Accord-style unionism will need to become involved in the struggle. The large turnout of young unionists at recent meetings is a promising sign. It's now up to officials to provide some space for democratic participation, leadership and direction to develop from the bottom up.