Comment by Maree Roberts
The Community and Public Sector Union's July 25 24-hour stoppage (July 31 in Victoria) was a success — not because all CPSU members heeded the union's call, but because they participated more actively than in recent disputes.
In many areas, especially those marked for cuts and/or increases in workload, participation was close to 100%, and picket lines attracted three and four times the numbers of previous disputes. Vastly decreased computer usage gave the lie to industrial relations minister Peter Reith's claim that the strike was a flop.
This was particularly so in areas like DEETYA and the Australian Tax Office. Moreover, Reith's claim that 90% of CES offices stayed open was a simple distortion of the facts — DEETYA directed CES managers to open, staff or no staff!
The strike showed that tens of thousands of public sector workers are opposed to Howard's cuts, concerned for their futures and prepared to struggle, given bold and intelligent leadership. They want to know where to go from here, with many saying that it's time to step up the union's half-hearted bans and "community" campaign.
The strike also confirmed that CPSU members want a campaign that fights to defend public services, and not just the working conditions of those who might survive. This position, contained in a supplementary motion to the July 23 mass meetings from supporters of the CPSU opposition network, National Challenge, received near unanimous support.
Another supplementary motion demanding mass meetings two weeks after the budget was also passed in many centres.
However, one 24-hour strike won't stop Howard. July 25 was not even as strong a response to the Coalition's "ambit claim" in this area as the May 30 protest of students and National Tertiary Education and Industry Union against Senator Vanstone's threats to tertiary education.
The strike was enough to cause hand wringing among the remaining ALP appointees in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy ("This would never have happened under us", delegates were told), but the government hasn't yet found much to fear in the behaviour of the Wendy Caird leadership of the CPSU. Since when did wearing pink or black ribbons to work on "national days of action" change anything?
The Caird leadership has not led, but has been pushed, into taking action. It has combined a lot of anti-Howard rhetoric with attacks on those sections of the union that were prepared to fight and which were endangering Caird's real strategy of negotiating the cuts with the government.
For example, Caird forced the ACT branch of the union to call off a four-hour stoppage on the June 6 national day of action; it has buck-passed bans proposals back and forth between delegates' committees and the union's national executive; many sections and offices that have imposed bans have been told they are alone when this is not the case; and agencies which have been told they are "safe" (like DSS) have not been involved in action.
There are even rumours that the union may back down from its recently imposed "dole diary" ban, which has been very effective.
The Caird leadership has finally been forced to take up the National Challenge argument that many "voluntary" redundancies are not voluntary at all, but only after having assisted Howard to "downsize" through inaction. Given this record, there's every chance that the CPSU leaders will now resume business as usual unless pressure is maintained on them.
Where to now? Given the support for the National Challenge motion setting goals for a campaign of resistance, the union must now state clearly that public services will be vigorously defended. This will require:
- Seriously educating CPSU members in what the cuts mean, and what a snare "voluntary redundancy" has proven to be for many workers;
- The biggest possible CPSU participation in the August 19 rallies called by the ACTU to protest against Reith's industrial relations legislation;
- Stepping up the campaign against the government with bans that hurt revenue collection;
- Building a "defend public services" alliance with all other sympathetic unions and community organisations;
- Demanding that the Greens, Democrats and Labor reject the budget; and
- Building an alliance with all those unions which don't accept that Howard has a mandate, and carrying the campaign beyond the ACTU's one-off protest on August 19.
[Maree Roberts is a workplace delegate and chair of the ACT Health and Family Services delegates' committee.]