By Dick Nichols
The federal government has already eliminated more than 15,000 jobs in the Australian Public Service (APS). At least another 10,500 are to go by June 1997. Telstra workers are staring at job losses on a similar scale.
Faced with such an onslaught, you might expect that all union opponents of the Coalition would develop some basic collaboration. Unfortunately, the real picture is mainly a dismal one of division and retreat. Despite resistance and anger in some quarters the Howard offensive is fostering splits among APS workers and sharpened tensions and rivalries within the main APS union, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU).
If the present trend of retreat masked by official bravado continues, the Coalition can look forward to implementing its plans for a minimal public sector without even raising a sweat—at least for the present round of cuts.
The last round of CPSU mass meetings (on August 23) were smaller, more divided and dispirited than ever. At the first Sydney mass meeting in the current round, more than 3000 CPSU members overflowed the city Masonic Centre: on August 23 a bare 800 bothered to gather in Belmore Park.
The CPSU leadership, headed by Joint national secretary Wendy Caird and mostly aligned to the ALP "left", is looking to ascribe the impending defeat to the apathy, narrow self-interest and lack of union consciousness of the membership.
Get your CPSU official just a little drunk at the end of the day, and he or she will soon be cursing "the members" for not turning up to mass meetings, for taking voluntary redundancies, for being concerned only with the fate of their own agency, for wanting to negotiate away other people's jobs to save their own and for not understanding the first thing about union principles.
A lot of this seems true at first glance. The response of public sector workers to Howard's cuts has varied according to such factors as whether they face immediate, medium-term or eventual extinction and whether there is any tradition of militant action at a departmental (agency) level.
But there's nothing new about departmentalism in the public service, or sectionalism in an Australian union, even if both are particularly marked in the CPSU: all capitalists and their governments work overtime at fostering such divisions, and any union worth its salt always struggles to contain them.
But the CPSU incumbents have internalised capital's program of fragmentation. Like 99% of union officialdom they humbly submitted to the ALP-ACTU Accord version of this, in particular its schemes to "rationalise" the public sector. Indeed, Caird and Co were enthusiastic hawkers of the most divisive aspect of the recipe—agency bargaining. (Now the union itself is being restructured along agency lines in an effort to disperse opposition to Caird — and this while Rome burns.)
CPSU members have been told for years that agency bargaining is a good thing, that Labor's reduction of strikes to the lowest level ever was an "achievement" and that militant unions like the BLF were "troublemakers" with a "special agenda". How can they be expected to reacquire basic union principles at a stroke, turn out eagerly for mass meetings and snap to attention for the fight against the Liberals?
Losers
But the story gets worse. Even this ramshackle CPSU could have done much better against Howard over the last four months—the opening was there as soon as Costello targeted public service jobs as "black hole" filling. But at every turning point, Caird and Co have shown an unerring instinct for the losing move.
When Howard announced the cuts and there should have been an immediate warning strike of all CPSU members, the CPSU leadership demanded "exact details". When the axe fell on regional offices of the Australian Tax Office and APS bans targeting revenue would have been the minimum response, Caird and Co decided on a futile ATO-only "campaign" involving a "national day of action" in which balloons played a vital role. Workers in other agencies didn't even know what was happening.
At the same time, branches and Â鶹´«Ã½ which didn't abide by the CPSU general staff's view of tactics were brought to heel. Caird personally flew to Canberra to quash a half-day strike by the ACT branch with the explanation that the union couldn't fight 15,000 voluntary redundancies. Calls for bans from state delegates committees were ignored for as long as possible, then sent back for "simplification": in some agencies, workers didn't know what bans were on and whether they were national or local. In others, like Comcare, bans were lifted without the knowledge of members.
The principle of division has been allowed free reign. Will DEETYA, Telstra and ABC members be defending themselves alone (each with their own balloon-bedecked "day of action")? If this tomfoolery continues, the divided will be ruled.
Moreover, the main industrial tactic that had a chance of stopping Howard — bans on revenue raising areas, with the workers affected being supported out of the union's fighting fund — doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone in CPSU headquarters, even though it's been raised in scores of delegate meetings.
There's even doubt that the proposal for mass meetings of all public sector unions, adopted at the last round of CPSU mass meetings, will take place.
All this is why so many CPSU members have "dropped out". They rightly sense that the Caird leadership isn't serious about fighting Howard's cuts and don't want to be part of sham mass meetings passing sham resolutions which, even where the words on the page are all right, aren't ever going to materialise in real action.
Where to now?
Among CPSU militants there's a debate as to whether the Caird leadership's performance is to be ascribed most to incompetence, treachery or cowardice. It hardly matters, since the real point is how to build the militant alternative to Caird and Co.
Here, in unfavourable conditions, progress is being made. After motions from CPSU opposition network National Challenge for a serious bans campaign received majority support at the first round of mass meetings, it succeeded in having a platform of struggle adopted by a majority of CPSU members in the second round of meetings in late July.
This has put some pressure on Caird and Co at least to come up with acceptable forms of words at successive mass meetings. In fact, the basic pattern of the "campaign" to date has been one of the CPSU "leaders" dragging along behind the lead given by National Challenge. The response to the 24-hour strike, when it finally happened in July, confirmed what potential was there for the union to fight back, despite some divisions on the left.
Nor is the picture all black. There is a widespread, if dispersed and unorganised, willingness to resist Howard's cuts and anger at the way the Custers of the CPSU are bungling the fight. For example, a recent decision by the CPSU's Tax Division executive to lift bans that were starting to inflict some pain was carried only 60% to 40%, and a letter of protest bearing 170 signatures is presently circulating in the ATO.
Nor, despite CPSU "generalship", has any decisive struggle been lost — it's still possible to register a win, given a sharp turn in methods.
Here the critical battle looms in DEETYA. The union has a chance of winning this fight on the following conditions:
lif it adopts industrial tactics that exceed the government's pain threshold;
lif it explains to all CPSU members that the privatisation of CES offices is simply the first cab off the rank and that everyone must support DEETYA workers; and
lif it goes on a real offensive to explain what Howard's plans for the public sector will actually mean to the community.
However, without massive pressure from CPSU members, it's highly likely that Caird and Co won't follow that path. Moreover, even in the case of a win in the DEETYA battle, the long-run struggle to defend public services can't be achieved without transforming the CPSU into a militant, fighting union truly committed to public sector defence. That means a big increase in the number of CPSU members prepared to struggle and sacrifice (that is, a big increase in a united and principled left inside the CPSU).
Here the immediate goal must be to consolidate National Challenge and local CPSU rank-and-file groups and networks as the main site of resistance to public sector cutbacks. This is no easy or short-term campaign, but there's no alternative if the present pattern of defeat and retreat is to be reversed.
[Dick Nichols is the industrial work
spokesperson of the Democratic Socialist Party.]