By Paul Oboohov and Tom Flanagan
The leadership of the Community and Public Sector Union and its new section council covering the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) have abandoned any pretence of a campaign to save the Commonwealth Employment Service.
Last year, the leadership anticipated that the federal government's proposed replacement for the CES, the Public Employment Placement Enterprise (PEPE), would be blocked in the Senate. Instead, the government sidestepped the Senate and set up the PEPE administratively.
The CPSU immediately conceded the whole battle, abandoning its members in CES and other DEETYA offices to a bleak future of "voluntary" redundancies and worsening work conditions in the PEPE.
Prior to this surrender, the team led by Vivienne Colmer, then CPSU national organiser for DEETYA and now DEETYA section secretary, repeatedly rejected the alternative strategy proposed by the CPSU rank-and-file group National Challenge (and supported strongly in many workplaces). National Challenge proposed a public service-wide industrial campaign focused on strategic action by members in key agencies, such as those collecting revenue.
Only three months ago, Colmer's team was elected on a platform of saving the CES and stopping the privatisation and contracting out of DEETYA work. With the elections over, and the union positions won, the campaign has been abandoned.
The present shambles is also attributable to last year's industrial action within DEETYA being limited to token public contact bans. While this had the effect of rallying members and keeping morale up for a while, DEETYA management eventually came to see these bans as part of the furniture.
Just before Christmas, DEETYA management, having taken the measure of the CPSU "leadership", moved quickly to demand that workers wanting to shift into the PEPE do so within a few days.
The CPSU leadership should have recognised from the start that the threat of loss of Public Service Act coverage by 7-8000 CPSU members is a public service-wide issue and should be fought as such.
Now, reacting to the threat of membership poaching by other unions, the new section council leadership seems to think that the only way to hold onto CPSU coverage in the PEPE is to initiate a certified agreement.
PEPE management, however, may want to start with its own clean slate — coverage by a union which will facilitate the downgrading of public sector norms to private sector conditions.
Alternatively, it may take the same route as the management of the Department of Social Security and the Service Delivery Agency: soothing workers' fears by allowing public service conditions to carry over with current DSS and DEETYA staff, but having new starters sign individual contracts.
The game from there will be to pit one group against the other and erode the conditions of former public servants, perhaps weakening unionisation in the process.
Despite this major setback, the opposition to the CPSU leadership in the CES is not lying down. The network of those who want to continue to resist the misleadership of the CPSU is being maintained.
A motion developed by National Challenge supporters in DEETYA, which once again calls on the national management committee to initiate a CPSU-wide strategic industrial defence of DEETYA members' jobs, coverage and conditions under the Public Service Act, is presently being put to meetings of CPSU members.
The motion points out: "The loss of 8000 staff from the Australian Public Service, and possibly the CPSU, is ... a major reduction in the public sector and the coverage of its conditions across the wider work force. This would set an unfortunate precedent for other public servants involved in service delivery, and as such cannot be tolerated by the union having coverage of federal public servants." [Paul Oboohov was the ACT representative on the DEETYA national delegates committee of the CPSU. Tom Flanagan is the CPSU delegate at the Darwin Student Assistance Centre.]