Sue Bolton
Newcastle members of the Community and Public Sector Union picketed the national office of the union in Sydney on June 9 to protest against a May 5 CPSU national management committee (NMC) decision to close down the union's Newcastle office on June 30 and to sack local organiser Gary Parker.
CPSU national officials not only refused to meet with the 30 picketers, they hired private security guards to prevent any of the picketers from entering the union offices.
Steve Tonks, a CPSU delegate in the tax office and member of the Newcastle tax section delegates committee told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly that the decision to close the Newcastle CPSU office had come "totally out of the blue".
He rejected allegations from some CPSU officials that the picket was initiated by "outside agitators". 'We're unionists. Unionists act by picketing", he said. "We did this because no-one's listening to us. No-one ever called us to discuss this issue. The members have been left in the dark."
The anger at the NMC's action was so great among Newcastle CPSU members that after two protest meetings on May 10 and May 12, the Hunter Alliance was formed on May 17 "for the purposes of retaining the Newcastle-based CPSU organiser position", said Tonks.
The Hunter Alliance involves CPSU members from the tax office, the Child Support Agency, Centrelink and Telstra 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳. The Newcastle Trades Hall Council secretary Gary Kennedy and a representative of the local Labor MPs accompanied a delegation of local CPSU delegates to see CPSU national secretary Adrian O'Connell on May 28, but their request for the decision to be reconsidered fell on deaf ears.
A lot of support for the campaign has come from CPSU members in Queensland, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.
In all states, CPSU staff have passed motions condemning the closure of the Newcastle office, the sacking of Parker and the lack of consultation. The motions pointed out that the way the decision had been made was in breach of the CPSU staff agreement to consult staff.
When he heard about the closure decision, CPSU telecommunications section secretary and Socialist Alliance member Terry Costello began campaigning among members of the CPSU national council for a special meeting to review the decision. Initially, only one other national councillor supported him.
"I would have thought that if they were thinking of closing the office, they should have floated the idea at council", Costello told GLW. "The council is the supreme policy making body of the union. Therefore, the decision should have been put to council after being floated amongst the members in the Hunter region. But it was all done behind closed doors."
Parker was sacked after he informed CPSU national officials he could not move to Sydney because he has a young baby and a special-needs child.
Hunter Alliance member Katie Cherrington is a labour-hire worker in a Newcastle Telstra call centre and CPSU delegate, so she doesn't have Parker as her union organiser. Instead, her organiser is based in Sydney. She told GLW that she had only recently discovered that a Newcastle CPSU office existed. "Before that if I needed to use a photocopier for information for members, I had to use my own money at the library, but I was getting to a point where I couldn't afford that any longer."
Cherrington, who has been involved in a campaign to unionise the call centre, said that having a union organiser based in Sydney made conducting the campaign very difficult. "If we want to have a meeting, we have to give him over a week's notice. We're casual workers. We can be rostered between six o'clock in the morning and eleven o'clock at night seven days a week. So we need to be able to call meetings when everyone is free, usually after work. When everyone's on shift work, it's really hard because he can't get to meetings when workers are finishing work because he has to go back to Sydney."
Since Parker was employed as the Newcastle organiser in 1999, CPSU membership has risen. Currently, there are a little over 1400 members in the tax office, Centrelink and Child Support Agency 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ in the Hunter. By contrast, the CPSU nationally has lost 25,000 members since 1997, according to the CPSU website.
Andrew Hall, a CPSU ACT regional councillor and a candidate for the opposition Members First group in the 2003 CPSU elections, told GLW that Members First is opposed to the closing of the Newcastle office. He said the decision is the result of the restructuring of the CPSU that was begun in 2000 by the ALP-aligned Progressive Caucus, which has controlled most of the union for the last few years.
"It is ironic that one of the reasons for the NMC closing down the Newcastle office is to free up more resources to organise the separate 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳, when at the same time, the organisers are running flat chat around the country trying to organise hundreds of separate agency agreements, many of them over the same issues and very similar agreements", said Hall.
"The style of union organisation in the last period", Hall added, "has definitely assisted in the decline of union membership."
Messages of support for the campaign to keep the Newcastle CPSU office open can be emailed to the Hunter Alliance at <hunteralliance2004@yahoo.com.au>. Protest messages can be emailed to the CPSU NMC at <Adrian.O'Connell@cpsu.org.au>.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 23, 2004.
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