Anyone watching the charade by Parliament’s front door security, as featured on the TV3 News, would have been amazed by the lack of common sense on display. The decision to hide a couple of security staff in a windowless room so that nobody would think staff  were standing around doing nothing was a classic case of form over substance.

This innovation has made Parliament less safe, less secure and less convenient, not to mention its likely demoralising effect on the security staff themselves. Nobody wants to spend their working day skulking in a backroom.   And not a cent will be saved. No wonder nobody wanted to own up on camera as to who actually made this decision.

In itself it’s a relatively minor matter, but for many in the public service, this type of change is becoming only too familiar.  More often than not, the emphasis seems to be is on the appearance of greater efficiency when in reality no real improvement takes place.

In its crusade for maximum efficiency, the Government is intent on squeezing public services – and it wants it done yesterday. The result is that changes are rushed and ill-conceived, demoralising for the staff concerned  and having no positive lasting impact.  Security staff at Parliament were not asked for their opinion or input. Instead an unpopular and unworkable decision was imposed on them that they have to live with.

We should all take heed of the recent study by researchers at Waikato University, reported in the Dominion Post, that warned restructuring in the health sector can be bad for productivity because it is distracting for organisations and those who work in them.

Parliament’s security travesty could be a metaphor for much of the wider changes taking place in the state sector where appearances are more important than substance.

As the march and rally for ACC in Wellington showed today, there is widespread opposition to the Government’s plan to cut services and raise levies.

As often happens, it’s  the less well off, who are hurt the most. For example, home support workers, the lowest paid of all ACC funded workers, have had their travel allowance cut, reducing their daily income by 19%. Workers who are employed in potentially hazardous workplaces will have reduced entitlements for work-related diseases. The changes will make it harder for people who have hearing loss caused by work to get access to hearing aids. Part-time, casual and seasonal workers will get reduced income compensation.

The old argument “there is no alternative” is trotted out to justify these cuts to entitlement. The Government’s claim that ACC is in financial trouble has no substance. The accident compensation scheme had a $1.1 billion operating surplus in 2009 and over $10 billion in reserves! A “crisis” has been manufactured by the Government demand that ACC should be fully funded by 2019.  In other words, it’s required to have money in the coffers now to cover possible claims for the next decade.

As Tim Hazledine, Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland, pointed out last year in the NZ Herald, this is a bit like asking parents to pay upfront to meet the future obligations to their children. Since that sum would be several hundred thousand dollars, most parents could be deemed to be “broke; busted; bankrupt”.

The hidden agenda here is that fully funding ACC will put it on the same financial footing as insurance companies so they can cash in when accident compensation is opened up to competition.

Currently ACC provides cheaper and better accident compensation than just about anywhere in the world. In Australia, for example, workers pay an average of $1.96 in every $100 of their pay towards accident their worker compensation schemes. In New Zealand workers pay 94 cents per $100.

It’s no wonder so different groups in the community are opposed to the Government’s plan for ACC. The message was loud and clear today : “Hands Off!”.

Last week we saw Don Brash provide a flashback to the 1990s with the 2025 taskforce recommendations. Most of us would find recycled advice on preparing for the Y2k disaster more helpful and relevant now than Brash’s horror set of recommendations.

But Don’s not the only one living in the past. We still see the same old tactics wheeled out in negotiations. A favourite of the 90s under the ECA was to make small offers at the bargaining table and in parallel make the offer to non-members and anyone else wanting to opt out of bargaining. The idea being that collective bargaining can be weakened by cash offers to workers to abandon the collective effort. That is exactly what MOJ  is  hoping to do currently by going out to non-union members with the offer rejected by the union.

Another was for an employer who finds themselves under immense pressure in bargaining, to respond by suddenly announcing a change in policy to apply to all staff thereby trying to deny any gain to the collective bargaining process.  IRD famously did it a decade ago with redundancy improvements and now Parliamentary Services are suddenly reviewing their performance pay policy and announcing pay improvements for everyone, when everyone knows the gains were achieved in collective bargaining.

Has nothing been learned since the 90s? PSA members want to move on and do not want to relive what will go down in history as a dreadful decade for labour relations and workers’ interests. Those stuck in the time warp need to wake up to the fact that there is no future in the past.

How to close the 35% income gap with Australia by 2025?  An ambitious goal like that calls for some fresh ideas. But that’s not what the Government has got from the 2025 Taskforce, headed by Don Brash.

Instead of looking forward 15 years to 2025, the Taskforce’s report, released today, seems to be looking back 15 years and beyond to when New Zealand’s  productivity relative to Australia plummeted.

Practically all of the recommendations look like a wish list of neo-liberal policies which have been tried and only increased the wealth of the very few at the expense of the many and the national interest.

Most of the recommendations have been made many times before. Treasury, Roger Douglas, the Business Roundtable and Ruth Richardson have all pushed the same old “cut taxes, cut regulation, cut the public sector” recipe for every challenge the country meets. It doesn’t matter what the question is, the answer is always the same from these people.

Just as in Nicky Hager’s The Hollow Men, Brash is again the leader of a group of New Zealanders who have nothing to offer but more misery for the poor and the vulnerable. There is no chance that this wish list of failed policies will help us catch Australia unless Australia experiences an unmitigated disaster sometime soon.

Surely addressing productivity requires a serious attempt to encourage high performance workplaces and a culture of continuous improvement. If Brash and co really want to improve public sector performance they could start by calling on the central agencies – the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the State Services Commission and the Treasury – to work with the PSA in developing the leadership and skills required for transforming the workplace into a high performance culture.

Productivity is partly about eliminating waste – ironically this whole 2025 exercise has so far been one big waste.

The Director General of Health organised an excellent event last Friday called ‘Productivity, Quality and Performance Improvement 2010/2011’. It was a gathering of employers, MOH officials and union leaders from the DHB sector. All of these parties have committed to work together on improving health sector productivity under the Health Sector Relationship Agreement.

Several presentations were made by overseas as well as local speakers about successful productivity initiatives. Most of these initiatives demonstrated an understanding and commitment to changing the culture of workplaces from the old style top down approaches of management to more team-based facilitative styles associated with lean systems thinking. A real sense of urgency and the need for a fundamentally transformational approach was embraced by participants.

Contrast that with what we keep hearing in the core public service. Apart from a couple of exceptions, everyone from cabinet ministers down seem to be all talk and no action when it comes to responding to the union’s demands for better and more productive ways of working. Instead, we hearing ‘you can’t measure productivity in the public service’ or ‘we’ve already done it’. The PSA keeps pushing the view that continuous improvement is never ‘done’ and while measurement is not straightforward, these issues are not an excuse for inaction.

PSA members are up for the challenge because they know that part of the secret to better productivity is better management. The question remains are employers, the SSC or the Ministers up for this challenge too or do they feel threatened by a transformational agenda?

For years the PSA has been fighting an uphill battle  for home support workers who suffer dreadful rates of pay and job insecurity. These workers, the majority of whom are female, support some of the most vulnerable people in our communities.

Now these dedicated workers have been disadvantaged even more. ACC has cut funding for home support workers who travel from job to job providing home care for people with injury. It has changed the rules and withdrawn funding for the first 20km and also reduced payments for some groups working on statutory holidays to ordinary time.

This is a reversal of a policy introduced a couple of years ago where it was recognised that travel costs and time were unfairly falling on those individuals who provided the home care. The PSA has discovered in negotiations with employers that this funding has been withdrawn and, like most cuts, the biggest effects will be felt by the most vulnerable and needy, in this case those incapacitated by injury and those who provide support for them.

In an industry marred by poor conditions of employment, a vulnerable workforce and service users who have little influence, ACC is targeting the poorest section of society who are not able to fight for themselves.

ACC’s new policies reinforce the perception that those at the top don’t give a damn about those at the bottom.

An experienced advocate will always be suspicious of very round numbers. And so it is with bargaining at the Ministry of Justice where MOJ are publicly saying – the PSA is claiming $100 million to settle the current pay dispute.

In fact the PSA has not sought any such figure. We know from experience that anything as round as $100 million is almost certainly an exaggeration one way of another and so is this. The PSA has simply stated that there is a very significant gap between what MOJ staff are being paid and what they should be paid according to MOJ’s own analysis using the Public Service median survey data. 1200 staff are paid 9.3 % less than they should be.

Our negotiating team is seeking solutions to this unsustainable problem and not getting any buy-in from the employer.  Amongst other things we have identified the need to eliminate wasteful systems and better manage resources.

Now the Government has made it clear that increases in pay mean fewer services. That equation has inevitably thrown up in members’  minds the question ‘does this mean we are subsidising the current Justice system to the tune of $100 million by accepting the wages we are getting?’.

PSA members are tired of being taken for granted, especially in light of the large bonuses being paid to senior staff in the state sector.

The public must be mystified that an organisation like ACC with more than $10 billion in reserves is in such financial strife that the Government is forced to reduce pay-outs and put up levies. And why, they may wonder, if ACC is such a financial liability, are private insurers lining up to get a slice of the action?

The truth appears to be that this ACC crisis has been manufactured to prepare the public for its privatisation. For years, ACC worked perfectly well as ‘a pay as you go’ scheme. It was- and still is- the envy of the world, a no-fault accident compensation scheme that provides security for workers and employers alike.

Now it’s deemed to be $4.8 billion in the red because it is required to “pre-fund” future obligations. However, as Tim Hazledine, Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland, pointed out in the NZ Herald, this is a bit like asking parents to pay upfront to meet the future obligations to their children. Since that sum would be several hundred thousand dollars, most parents could be deemed to be “broke; busted; bankrupt”.

Interestingly, employers are not so enamoured with the idea of handing over ACC to private insurers. “Having a full private insurance market won’t provide stability in the premium setting market, and it would make more forecasting and budgeting work for employers,” says Paul Jarvie, Occupational Health and Safety Manager for the Northern Employers and Manufacturers Association.

The only winners from privatising ACC are the same as those who benefit from the expensive and dysfunctional US health system – multinational insurance companies and the lawyers.

It’s not so much that public sector CE’s have had another pay rise that irks PSA members. After all they have enormous responsibility in their jobs and should be paid fairly. What is annoying is that senior public servants and politicians are telling everyone else that they are undeserving and that it would be irresponsible to increase pay for those who work in the engine room and the front line of the public service.

The SSC is trying to argue that these pay rises are only for the period that went from July 08 to June 09 and from here on restraint will apply. That is all very well if you have just received a five-figure increase on top of your six-figure salary. I suspect our members at Parliamentary Service, at Ministry of Justice(MOJ) and the clerical staff working in the South Island DHBs would accept some restraint if they enjoyed these sort of increases in the last year.

But, of course, nothing could be further from reality. The clerical staff have had a pay freeze for years, the Parliamentary Service staff are being offered a reduction in collective agreement and MOJ staff have been told that they will continue to slip even further behind the public sector median as they have been for the last few years.

What’s lacking is any sense of fairness. The pay systems are completely lacking credibility already and now parliamentarians and senior public servants are getting rises while reminding everyone else of the tough times we’re in. Nobody is fooled by the double standards.

Anyone with any real knowledge of events reading the large ‘We Apologise’ advertisements in the NZ Herald today and in recent days will see it for what it is – just spin. The ads are about the lockout of bus drivers but the word ‘lockout’ doesn’t appear of course.

Instead we get an explanation full of threatened industrial activity by unions, strike notices and suspensions that could not be helped. The apology portrays the company as having no choice in the matter because of the unions’ strike action, which has one way or another caused the disruption to the public on the week schools start back from holidays.

But, of course, it’s the employer who has stopped the services – not the union. The union has said the workers will keep working for what they are contracted for, but in view of the inadequate response from employers in bargaining, they will not be going the extra mile at the moment and they will do no extras. That’s what ‘working to rule’ is.

In fact the workers have even offered to take kids to school without pay and while they are being locked out if the employer is willing to allow them to.

The employer’s apology is hollow and once again goes to show that some employers cannot be relied upon to communicate fairly to the public or the workforce during bargaining and especially during disputes.