By Steve Rogers
CANBERRA — Public Service Union leaders are running for cover in the wake of the August 17 federal budget. On August 25 the PSU National Executive suspended its enterprise bargaining negotiations with the government.
Planned cuts of 15,000 public servants in the next three to four years have left the PSU enterprise bargaining strategy in tatters.
Those currently listed to face the greatest cuts are the Department of Arts and Administrative Services and the Department of Primary Industries and Energy. However, these just look like the first cabs off the rank. Budget papers announced program reviews of nearly all major departments, excluding Defence, to come up with substantial restructuring proposals by February 1994.
According to the August 18 Canberra Times, DAAS's "Australian Construction Service is to lose another 180 staff, dropping its core number from the 780 that was agreed to with unions only a month ago." In all, department business units will be cut by 1800 jobs over the next four years.
The PSU estimates cuts at DPIE to number up to 800, or 20% of the department, over the next four years. In Sydney an August 20 stop-work meeting was followed by a immediate walkout for the rest of the day. In DPIE's central office in Canberra an August 25 meeting of around 150 condemned the cuts. The meeting gave the department 24 hours to respond before commencing a campaign to reverse them, including the option of industrial action.
The majority of cuts at DPIE are directed against meat inspectors. For several years the federal Labor government has undertaken a project to eliminate these inspectors. As part of this, costs of meat inspection have been shifted to the producers. This has united both large rural corporations and small farmers in opposition to the inspectors. Having imposed these costs and created this hostility, the government now claims that because the costs of inspection are too high, meat inspection jobs have to go.
In place of meat inspectors, the government is attempting to introduce a system of "quality assurance." The budget papers explain this as follows: "Quality Assurance (QA) is the process whereby industry takes on more responsibility for quality throughout the production or processing cycle."
This places meat producers on a trust system, something along the lines of "I promise this isn't kangaroo, flyblown or poisoned by pesticides."
PSU officials have expressed astonishment at the budget results. A national executive meeting on August 25 resolved to withdraw from all enterprise bargaining discussions at the moment. A list of several his. These included the budget job cuts, a dispute over the implementation of competency based training, and a draft Department of Industrial Relations proposal on the interpretation of the enterprise bargaining agreement signed late last year.
In each of these cases the PSU is distancing itself from positions it held just weeks ago. Since mid-1992, the national union leadership devoted its entire efforts to selling the virtues of the Labor government agenda to public servants. This agenda is well publicised. Part of it is job cuts. Another is reduction in real wages. Another is the forced re-enrolment of the entire public service through "competency based training."
Both the PSU and the Department of Industrial Relations (DIR) agreed that the fine print of the enterprise bargaining agreement was ambiguous, something pointed out by opponents of the agreement last year. The agreement was an attack on public service conditions just waiting to happen. As part of the process of clarifying the ambiguities, DIR recently presented a set of draft guidelines and some examples of how it could be applied. Apparently among the proposed "flexible employment conditions" in this document was the option of introducing 12-hour shifts!
It appears that union leaders have been preparing for some time to put enterprise bargaining on hold. Just at the moment it is not assisting the national leadership either advance its collective parliamentary ambitions, or even survive in the short term.
For the great majority of PSU members, the only time they see an organiser is when there is a national round of meetings. Over the past year, such meetings have been exclusively related to enterprise bargaining. At meeting after meeting, union officials have taken on the task of selling "painless" tradeoffs and the wonders of negotiating with a Labor government. With branch elections approaching in November, the first task of most officials now becomes one of campaigning for the incumbent officers. At a time when the Labor government is kicking union members in the teeth, the union leaders' enterprise bargaining agenda needs to be hidden for a while.
The same has happened to proposals for ALP affiliation. After the surprise ALP election victory in March, PSU national secretary Peter Robson started testing the water for PSU affiliation of ALP. No hint of this remains today. As one union organiser (and ALP member) put it to a Canberra departmental meeting, in light of the budget it was unlikely the PSU would "ever affiliate to the ALP."