PSA OFFICIALS REFUSE TO FIGHT JOB CUTS

The Government's austerity drive is now targeting the state sector, despite the fact that John Key and the National party said during the 2008 election campaign that would be no major reforms to the state sector during its first term.

This promise has gone the same way as John Key's promise not to increase GST.

Both Stephen Joyce and Anne Tolley have announced cuts in education funding although neither minister will own up to wielding the big axe.

Joyce is claiming he's just improving the tertiary system but his so-called 'improvements' will see a swathe of course scrapped because they are deemed to have too high a failure rate and there will be more job losses.

Similarly, fresh from taking the axe to community education, Tolley wants to see the $25 million cut from the education sector by 2012.

So how many jobs are to go? The Government is claiming it has no figures on possible job losses but its hardly believable that they have not been provided reports from officials.

Already some 3000 jobs have gone in the public sector since National came to power. These job losses have met with no resistance from the union bureaucrats in the Public Service Association (PSA). They have done absolutely nothing.

And the PSA officialdom are threatening to carry on doing absolutely nothing in response to Tolley's demand for $10 million worth of savings this next financial year.

Brenda Pilot, the national secretary of the PSA, has clearly been reading Andrew Little's How To Be A Really Dismal Union Official.

Pilot's response to Tolley's demands? She and the PSA are 'going to be keeping a close eye on any impact the cost cutting has on the delivery of education services.' I'm sure that this will have Tolley shaking in her high heels.

So Pilot has unilaterally decided that job losses are inevitable and she's just going to sit on her bottom and let it happen with the minimum of fuss and bother.

Pilot and the PSA are, once again, betraying the very people who pay their big fat salaries.

A proper fighting union - which the PSA isn't - would be organising state sector workers with a clear message to the government that the PSA intends to resist not only the new round of cuts but the attack on the public sector generally.