The Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and Union Strategies in the Australian Public Service
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Australian Labor government’s recognition of collective bargaining under its Fair Work Act 2009, and its efficiency drive from late 2011 across the Australian Public Service (APS), presented the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) with an opportunity to explore means of union renewal following a decade of conservative governments focused on union exclusion. An expanding budget deficit in 2011 placed considerable financial constraints on Australian government revenue. The Labor government increased the annual “efficiency dividend”, or across the board cuts in funding, from 1.5 per cent in May 2011 to 4 per cent in November 2011 as it attempted to achieve a budget surplus. This placed considerable pressure on agency management to remain within tight constraints on wage increases and to find budget savings, resulting in growing job losses from 2011. There was also considerable central oversight over bargaining outcomes throughout this bargaining round, with the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) involved at all stages of the agreement-making process, to the frustration of many agencies and the CPSU. Nevertheless, throughout the 2011-12 bargaining round, the CPSU worked with its members to develop creative forms of industrial action, such as one minute stoppages in the Defence department. The union also mobilized an overwhelming majority of APS employees to vote “no” in response to initial offers put by agency managements. In addition, the CPSU focused on winning bargaining concessions in politically sensitive government agencies and then flowing these concessions to other agencies. Typical of this approach were the agreements reached in the Immigration department and Customs agency. Union recruitment activities over 2011 resulted in a substantial rise in membership and enhanced communications with members through workplace meetings, telephone and internet communications, and emails. Such union initiatives highlight the potential for enhanced union capacities and mobilization during a time of growing austerity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".