By Daniel Kelly
With the 1996 federal budget, the Howard government released Reforming Employment Assistance, a ministerial statement by Senator Amanda Vanstone, minister for employment, education, training and youth affairs (DEETYA).
The statement outlines the government's plans for dramatic changes to labour market assistance and spells out the end of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) and the transition of the majority of CES employees (around 7000) to private sector wages and conditions in 1998.
The changes involve the creation of an "employment placement market" in which private sector Employment Placement Enterprises (EPEs) are to compete by tendering for contracts with the government to perform employment placement functions formerly performed by the CES. EPEs would be rewarded by the payment of set fees for the successful placement of various categories of unemployed people into jobs, as well as for other functions.
The vast majority of existing CES staff would be transferred to a public EPE (or PEPE), which would compete against private EPEs for contracts. Although public sector employees would go to the PEPE with public sector wages and conditions, these would cease to apply at an early stage of the PEPE's existence so as to enable the PEPE to compete with the EPEs on equal terms, and to yield the "efficiencies" desired by the government.
Needless to say, CES employees are alarmed at the prospect of having to defend their hard-won employment conditions in isolation from the public service, and especially in the new industrial climate that the government is trying to create.
More broadly, all public sector employees should be very nervous about their futures and should take a keen interest in the battle for continued public sector coverage that the Community and Public Sector Union will have to fight to defend its members currently employed by the CES.
An indication of the government's undeclared plans for the rest of the public sector can be gleaned not only from the proposed fate of the CES, but also from the arrangements it is putting in place for DEETYA and DSS (the Department of Social Security). These departments will be pruned back to much smaller organisations than they are today, with their main future responsibilities being policy development and administering contracts for service delivery — services that they used to deliver themselves!
This could well be the future of the entire public sector, with all large-scale service delivery, assessment and processing being contracted out, and the public sector dramatically reduced in size, its lost functions being delivered according to the dictates of the profit motive, rather than considerations of the best interests of the members of the public that the service is being delivered to.
The government has already set in place what looks remarkably like a vehicle to carry another huge slice of public sector employees into the private sector.
Combined with the destruction of the CES, Reforming Employment Assistance outlines the creation of a new statutory authority (as yet unnamed) that will take over most of the remaining service delivery functions currently provided by the DSS and DEETYA. The new agency will come under the Social Security portfolio and will have 23,000 staff and a budget of $40 billion; that is, it will be responsible for 30% of total Commonwealth budget expenditure.
This new agency will absorb about 2000 DEETYA staff, the remainder coming from the DSS. It has been described as a one-stop-shop for all the payments and services now provided by DSS, as well student assistance, the registration of job seekers, their assessment for benefits and possible referral to EPEs for labour exchange services and Intensive Employment Assistance. Further functions are to be transferred to the new agency from other government departments over time.
The new agency will operate under contract to deliver services on behalf of Commonwealth (policy) departments. It will make its own decisions regarding the best way to deliver services, its chief executive officer responsible for ensuring that service agreements with client (government) departments are met.
Once established, the operations of such an agency could well be privatised, office by office, by allowing potential private sector providers to bid for contracts to perform these functions, in the same way the government is privatising CES functions.
In a live departmental television broadcast answering questions from DEETYA staff on August 30, DEETYA secretary Sandy Hollway denied that there were plans to expose the new agency to private sector competition in future, but conceded that some of its functions may be contracted out over time.
Regardless of this denial, the attempted destruction of the CES is clearly an early round, along with the privatisation of Telstra, in the implementation of the Howard government's real program of subjecting public sector service delivery to the profit motive, regardless of the social impact, and using privatisation and competition for contracts to force down workers' wages.
The clear message to public sector workers and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) is that they must meet the current round of attacks with an APS-wide campaign. Only by taking action as a united force can members hope to defeat the government's agenda to privatise the public sector. The alternative is to be picked off agency by agency.
It is also clear that one-day strikes by service delivery agencies are of little concern to the government, which may well prefer a situation in which its clients are pitted against its employees. What is needed is an overall CPSU strategy of picking a sector of its workers that can restrict government revenue or paralyse its operations, (tax office or information technology workers, for example), to go on an indefinite strike, with their wages funded by a levy on all CPSU members. The purpose of such a strike would be to block the implementation of the Howard agenda.
Such a strategy would obviously depend on mobilising broad public support based on popular concern about the community-wide impact of the policies being implemented by the Howard government
Such a strategy can defeat the Howard government, but it requires the CPSU leadership to have the guts to represent the real interests of all its members, rather than putting up token agency-based industrial action that will serve only to keep members busy as the carve-up continues.
Agency-based industrial action, or an even narrower focus on DEETYA members in the CES, seems to be the extent of the vision of the current CPSU leadership. Such a campaign, barring a miracle in the Senate, is bound to end up with the role of the union being to negotiate the terms of defeat; that is, the conditions for the next big round of "voluntary" redundancies.
To forgo the struggle that is clearly necessary and to accept voluntary redundancies as the means of resolving the crisis faced by individual staff members would demonstrate an indifference to the fate of the public sector in Australia, the quality of the service it delivers to the public and to the fate of the CPSU itself.
While a strategy of indefinite industrial action with striking members' wages paid from a strike fund may seem drastic, the situation faced by CPSU members in the CES today is drastic. When they are gone, it will be another sector facing privatisation. To fight now is to fight when our numbers are strongest and our members not yet demoralised. To delay is to welcome defeat and to throw away the notion that society should be based on something more than the motivation to make short-term profits regardless of the social consequences.