By Paul Oboohov
CANBERRA—A sign of the disaster unfolding in the Australian Public Service is the recent stampede of 4000 Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) workers — half the workforce — to apply for jobs in the Service Delivery Agency (SDA) as their last hope of public service employment.
The SDA, also known as the "one stop shop" for social security services, will absorb all Department of Social Security (DSS) staff and some workers from the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs (DEETYA) toward the end of the year.
With only 2000 jobs on offer for CES-DEETYA staff, the other 2000 applicants were sent their rejection notices in mid-March. Apparently many, if not most, have appealed.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) in DEETYA, led by section secretary Viv Colmer, agreed to a staff selection process that ignored the public service practice of merit selection in favour of a straight seniority system. This meant sorting out a mess, because many workers have been acting in jobs above their grades for years.
DEETYA management had hoped for an indecently hasty process that would allow the computers immediately to spit out the longest serving and most senior workers. To carry out this dirty work, the government dragooned, with CPSU agreement, the Merit Protection and Review Agency as a paid consultant, compromising it and merit selection at one stroke.
During the process, management brushed aside an annoying aspect of the process agreement it had made with the CPSU section leadership in DEETYA. Originally, disability job advisers (one of several specialist functions in the CES) were to be regarded as separate for selection purposes, and indeed higher management issued instructions to this effect. However, CES area management complained of difficulties, and national management promptly reversed their instructions, boding ill for other specialist functions.
The CPSU section leadership simply vented its frustration to members and was left promising to seek a job in the SDA for disability job advisers who miss out.
Those who do miss out at this stage, some 6000, are consigned to the Public Employment Placement Enterprise (PEPE), the private company that is being set up to take over CES functions and compete with other private employment placement companies.
This will mean workers being thrown out of public service employment and conditions. It will be a body blow to the maintenance of such conditions elsewhere and a green light for stepped-up attacks on the public sector in the forthcoming budget.
Towards the end of this year, the PEPE management will select who it wants and initiate a major round of redundancies. Those missing out at that stage are meant to have a right of return to DEETYA (by then a rump policy department of 2000). However, the "new DEETYA" is unlikely to change its current level of staffing, so these workers will most probably be offered a DEETYA redundancy package.
Conditions in the PEPE will be anyone's guess, with the CPSU moving to retain coverage with a pre-emptive log of claims, while there are strong rumours that the Australian Services Union, covering private sector clerks, is sniffing around for possible coverage, facilitated under the new Workplace Relations Act.
The whole strategy of the CPSU leadership has been to rely on the Senate, with only token industrial action. The Caird-Colmer leadership claimed a victory when the Senate voted down a clause in the SDA legislation allowing the chief executive officer to employ new staff under conditions decided by the SDA Board, which would have included individual contracts.
While this means public service conditions remain in the SDA, this is only as good as the stance of the leadership on maintaining public service conditions in general.
Here the signs are not good. While rejecting the Coalition's Australian Workplace Agreements in principle, the Wendy Caird leadership of the CPSU has decided to service members wanting the CPSU as their bargaining agent and adviser, and has even decided to service non-members on a fee for service basis. Thus little stands in the way of the Service Delivery Agency using contracts as an industrial weapon, despite the Senate vote.
This whole unfolding disaster did not have to happen. A service-wide industrial campaign by the CPSU, targeting collection of government revenue, computer systems and other strategic areas, would have brought the government to the bargaining table. The worst aspects could have been changed, jobs could have been saved (and still can).
However, the Caird-Colmer leadership assumes membership apathy, and is currently polling the membership to seek guidance as to what it should do. Meanwhile, CPSU members have been waiting in vain for the leaders to show leadership qualities. As a result, the CPSU stagnates, and there is no effective opposition to the federal government's vandalising of the public sector.
[Paul Oboohov works in DEETYA in Canberra and is a member of the opposition CPSU rank-and-file network National CHallenge.]