Put yourself in the shoes of a typical public sector worker for a minute. You are a 37-year-old mum working in Medicare in, say, Parramatta in Sydney’s western suburbs earning $56,000-$69,000 a year. In the past five years, one in six of your workmates have lost their jobs, your workload is ballooning. Customers are waiting longer in queues and on calls.
Your boss – in this case the Abbott government – starts saying in parliament and to the media that your conditions are “cushy” and that there are too many of you. Oh, and that you and your female colleagues are a bunch of double dippers for having the temerity to access paid maternity leave. Then, over the course of the past year, they have tried to decrease your workplace rights, conditions and real wages in bargaining.
You’d be feeling a little insecure, wouldn’t you?
Sadly, this is the reality of a public sector worker under the current government. This is the most virulent attack on public servants in decades.
Since the Abbott government came to power, 17,300 commonwealth public sector jobs have been lost. They have banked Labor’s so-called “efficiency dividend” cuts and gone much, much further. We have seen the Australian Taxation Office’s capacity gutted with 4,400 jobs gone while the CSIRO will lose one in five staff.
Officials such as ex-Treasury head Martin Parkinson and secretary of finance Jane Halton have warned that the cuts threaten the public sector’s capacity to provide high quality policy advice. Just weeks ago, the Australian National Audit Office revealed that 26 million calls to Centrelink went unanswered last year.
Such warnings fall on deaf ears, with the government seeking further cuts and launching a “contestability programme” that could pave the way for the outsourcing of further functions to the private sector. Health minister Sussan Ley is canvassing interest from the private sector to run the system by which $29bn of Medicare benefits and payments are paid to millions of Australians each year.
Bargaining negotiations for the pay and conditions of 160,000 Australians working in the public sector began over a year ago. The government claims it is generously offering employees pay rises capped at 1.5% which the dastardly union is blocking them from accepting. Nice line, but it’s simply not true. In fact, this government has unleashed a bargaining policy that seeks to strip up to 70% of the content in existing agreements and put these rights into policy where workers can lose them at the stroke of a pen. It seeks to start those cuts now, reducing workers’ rights, requiring “cashable savings” in employee costs to get anything close to that 1.5% pay cap.
The policy – the brainchild of employment minister Eric Abetz – is less a negotiation and more a diktat to agency chiefs to remove rights and lower real wages to their workforces.
Thousands of public sector workers face a cut in their current take home pay, with reduced allowances, cuts to rights and penalty rates with increased hours more than outweighing a 1.5% pay offer.
A part-time mum working in Centrelink or Medicare faces the loss of rights that allow her to juggle work with her family life; her job security is under threat and all for a cut in her pay packet.
Customs investigators working at Sydney Airport, meanwhile, whose allowances make up a substantial part of their salary, stand to lose over $5,000 a year from their take home pay, or over $8,000 if they don’t accept the new agreement.
Unsurprisingly the heads of government agencies haven’t been too keen to put these deals to an all-staff vote. Abetz’s own department tried just before Christmas, but 95% of all staff – and that’s not just union members – voted the offer down.
This unworkable bargaining policy, still going a year after the expiry of their old agreements, has left public servants in a sort of industrial relations limbo; they get to keep their conditions and rights but their pay has flatlined.
It’s because of this that tens of thousands of our members in Centrelink, Medicare, Veterans’ Affairs, Customs and Immigration, CSIRO and 11 other public service agencies are taking strike action from Thursday. They are angry at the way they are being treated and they are taking a stand by exercising their legal right to industrial action.
The target of the strikes over the next week is not the community, though it will be affected, but the government. By taking action in numbers not seen in nearly 30 years, public sector workers aim to pressure the Abbott government into changing its unfair policy. This is no way to treat your workforce. It’s time for real world industrial relations and an end to using public service bargaining as a tool in some broader ideological war.
If you see a public sector worker out on strike in the week ahead, spare a thought, toot your horn or give them a wave because they are fighting for your public services.