BY ANDREW HALL
CANBERRA — Activists from the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) rank-and-file group, Members First, are campaigning against the latest tactic in the federal government's war on workers: using the federal government's New Apprenticeship Scheme to drive down entry-level wages in the Australian Public Service (APS).
Under the scheme, "apprentice" employees in the APS are paid a maximum of 80% of the base grade APS 1 wage. This rate is calculated by deducting one days' pay a week for training. The wage for an APS 1 varies ranges from $24,020 to $33,880. Since most new apprenticeships are awarded to 18 to 21 year olds, junior rates apply.
A stark example is in the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), where a 16-year-old new apprentice (entitled to 60% of the adult minimum wage, with a further deduction for time off on training) receives a gross income of $14,000 per year.
This is equivalent to the current poverty line for a single wage earner who rents (many apprentices are self-supporting). To survive, many APS apprentices have no choice but to work one or two extra jobs. Go into a fast food outlet in Canberra on a weeknight and you stand a good chance of being served by an APS new apprentice.
The rationale for these low wages is that new apprentices have less skills and lower productivity than other workers. This ignores the fact that APS new apprentices include skilled university graduates and older non-graduates with several years of work experience. Very few APS agencies audit staff productivity, so there is no measure of relative productivity.
The work that new apprentices do exposes the falsity of the low skills/productivity argument. There are cases of apprentices doing their supervisors' jobs while they are away on leave. APS new apprentices are often expected to perform work at substantially higher levels of responsibility and complexity than their training position, without getting the benefit of "higher duties allowance" available to other staff.
To make matters worse, new apprentices also get trained in an erratic manner. New apprentices are supposed to start training two months after employment. In some agencies, it starts much later. In DEST, new apprentices employed in January 2002 only started training in June.
Training is not the responsibility of the employer, but of the company contracted to run the local New Apprenticeship Centre. Agencies are therefore free to work their apprentices for five days a week and pay them for four.
Not surprisingly, new apprentices are routinely warned not to speak to the union. They are temporary employees and can be sacked at the whim of management, so they have little choice but to comply.
Shocked by this racket, Members First has put a motion to the CPSU ACT regional council requesting that the CPSU national executive investigate the wages and conditions of APS staff engaged through the New Apprenticeship Scheme.
The motion also calls for a campaign to enact legislation that would: raise the pay of all entry level staff to the full APS 1 wage, irrespective of their age; ensure parity between new apprenticeships and other relevant APS training schemes (cadets and graduates are both paid while they train); and correct any other problems the investigation uncovers.
Where appropriate, action in the Industrial Relations Commission to recover unpaid wages should also be authorised where wages have been docked for training when, in fact, no training has been provided and management has made no effort to rectify this.
It is unclear if the leadership of the CPSU, notorious for its lack of a campaign against enterprise bargaining and its failure to fight the loss of over 100,000 public sector jobs under the present government, will stand up for the new apprentices.
[For a copy of the Members First motion, email <membersfirst@bigpond.com> or phone 0438 624 744.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, July 24, 2002.
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