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Tens of thousands of public servants at the Australian Taxation Office and several other federal agencies could be required to work longer hours without specific compensation under a bid by the Australian Public Service Commission to standardise the length of the public service working day.
In the most audacious move by the APSC in the current bargaining round so far, the public service’s workplace enforcer has lobbed a new “common condition” across the entire public service that proposes to extend the working days of employees of agencies who now have daily hours below the majority threshold of seven hours and 30 minutes.
“Currently, around 80% of agencies have ordinary working hours of seven hours, 30 minutes per day,” the APSC’s preliminary Commonwealth position on APS working hours, released on Monday and obtained by The Mandarin, states.
“The chief negotiator is proposing to make seven hours and 30 minutes the standard working hours for all agencies, impacting approximately 20% of agencies. These proposed changes will impact each agency differently.
“Agencies currently with working hours above or below seven hours and 30 minutes will be required to adjust to the new common standard in their next enterprise agreement.”
While most of the APS uses the 7.5-hour working day definition, the Australian Taxation Office retains a seven-hour, 21-minute workday. So do the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority and the Australian Skills Quality Authority.
The ATO will easily be the biggest and hardest battleground for the APSC to try and get any increase in working hours from public servants without commensurate compensation, especially with the Australian Services Union Taxation Officer’s Branch bringing an audit lens and hard numbers to any fuzzy language.
“The APSC is proposing a common condition of a seven-hour, 30-minute day across the APS, with no exceptions. The ATO has a seven-hour, 21-minute day. This is equivalent to taking one week of leave for all ATO staff,” branch secretary Jeff Lapidos told The Mandarin.
“The ATO also wants to prevent any early shutdown by any APS agency on the last business day before Christmas. The ATO closes at 12.00 on the last business day before Christmas.”
The proposed increase in hours at the ATO could also sink a ‘yes’ vote for any new EBA, potentially excluding agency-specific wage talks if they are declared intractable and sent to arbitration.
Part of the problem APS leaders and the APSC face is that the combined front to achieve uniform, service-wide agreements and wage deals suits some APS employees and unions far better than others, especially where there is a market premium on specialist rather than generalist skills.
However, smaller unions within the APS have little or no hesitation in decoupling from a broader uniform push and taking their chances at arbitration, because of the often large discount compared with labour-discount specialists like lawyers, auditors, scientists, and technology professionals who opt to become public servants.
The Commonwealth’s initial wage offer to its public servants is slated to hit the table on October 13, with offers to agencies bound by determinations, rather than bargaining, already coming in at just 3% a year.
