CPSU union activists run candidate

By Ben Courtice

Members First, an independent group of activists in the Tax Office section of the Community and Public Sector Union, is standing a candidate on the CPSU Challenge ticket in the union's national elections.

Robert Finn, who works in Moonee Ponds in Melbourne, is standing for the position of assistant secretary. He has worked in the Tax Office for 14 years.

While Members First is not formally part of the national CPSU Challenge network, there is some overlap in membership and policy. Members First was formed by activists who had become disillusioned with the tax section leadership's response to an increasingly aggressive management agenda, manifested in the 1996 agency agreement which allowed forced relocation of staff and compulsory redundancies.

Following the election of the Liberal government, workers in the Tax Office have had their jobs and conditions threatened. Regional offices have been closed, and now management is planning to close a number of large branches.

In support of public service-wide union action, Finn's statement for the CPSU journal Our Voice notes: "We are facing a government with a single agenda. Yet each government agency is isolated from the others, and we fight our battles individually."

"I have no faith in the leadership of the CPSU", Finn told Green Left. "For 13 years, the government was supposedly supporting us and we had to toe the line. We have leaders who perceive things in a corporatist manner, but now that we don't have that corporatist state, they don't know how to act or react -- so they don't."

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