Mass meeting on WA Government "in-sourcing"

Richard Titelius*

On June 23, over 150 members of the Community and Public Sector 
Union/Civil Service Association (CPSU/CSA) attended a mass 
meeting at the Sheraton Hotel in Perth, Western Australia. They 
were protesting moves by the Gallop Government to have the human 
resources and purchasing functions of all government agencies 
become part of a shared service to be accommodated in an office 
building in an outer suburb of Perth.

The move to "rationalise" corporate services is set to strip real 
jobs from at least 1100 workers and place them on redeployment. 
It will also significantly increase the workloads of many of the 
remaining workers.

The government was concerned enough by the CPSU/CSA's calling of 
the meeting for some agencies to advise workers that attendance 
at it was not sanctioned. The threat was made despite the fact 
that the meeting was being held during lunchtime.

CPSU/CSA Branch Secretary, Toni Walkington addressed workers at 
the gathering, telling them that, "While government had agreed on 
overarching principles, it was not yet going to put pen to paper 
to anything more than a quarantine of the positions to be 
affected by the rationalisation of services".

Ms Walkington accused the government of "only telling the workers 
what they want to hear, and not engaging with the workers on all 
the issues coming from the shop floor".

A workplace delegate from the Department of Community 
Development, Mike Gullan, added that, "Workers in various 
government agencies have yet to be advised whether the people or 
positions would be abolished. The government's silence on how 
redeployment will affect the workers in the proposed 
rationalisation is deafening".

The spin accompanying the Government's announced "reforms" has 
broken new ground in economic rationalist doublespeak. It is 
using terms like "benefit realisation" and "harvesting benefits" 
to describe the proposed loss of jobs in the corporate services 
functions of its agencies.

By 2008 the Gallop Government anticipates that it will have a 
system in place whereby government agencies will be able to 
purchase corporate services from a single common government 
service provider.

However, after 2008 it will also conceivable that government 
agencies will be able to purchase their corporate services from a 
private provider. This is the more insidious agenda that the 
government is not making public.

A series of resolutions was passed at the meeting, which included 
emailing the Minister responsible for the negotiations into the 
corporate services reforms, John Kobelke.

Premier Geoff Gallop was urged to support the union's claim for a 
written agreement to protect the rights of workers affected by 
the changes, to negotiate with the CPSU/CSA for fair and 
equitable principles and to provide details of the process of the 
establishment of the proposed shared services centre.

* * *

* Delegate for CPSU/CSA at the Department of Justice