Staff at the Australian Taxation Office could yet be headed to the Fair Work Commission to secure a pay deal better than the current offer of an 11.2% increase with a starting bonus after the Taxation Officers’ Branch of the Australian Services Union (ASU) recommended ATO staff vote ‘no’ after a thumping membership poll.
In communications to members sent Tuesday, ASU Taxation Officers’ branch secretary Jeff Lapidos said that the strong turnout and vote against accepting the current deal had prompted the union to take the dispute to the workplace umpire, a move that occurs when bargaining parties cannot reach an agreement.
Tax staff are incensed that despite holding out against two successive attempts to erode conditions under the previous government, there has been no offer of catch-up pay to account for pay rises that were withheld because the ASU refused to trade away conditions.
“The ASU Tax Executive met this morning. We considered the results of our membership vote. We decided the ASU will run a vote NO campaign to get a high NO vote to trigger an intractable bargaining dispute and arbitration on pay for ATO staff by a Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission,” Lapidos said in an email to members.
“We will need your support throughout this campaign to give us the best chance of success in our goal of getting a fair pay outcome for all ATO staff.”
The numbers from the vote are fairly stark. Some 67% of members of the ASU’s Tax Branch voted, and of those “71% voted for Option A: Campaign for a NO vote so we can apply for an arbitrated fair pay outcome by a Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission.”
Just 29% voted to accept the commonwealth’s pay proposal for the ATO.
A real issue for the ATO is that even though the ASU tax branch is a comparatively small union compared to the Community and Public Sector Union, it has strong coverage within the agency and is not beholden to service-wide pattern bargaining that the Australian Public Service Commission has used to get its current deal across the line.
It’s also (and would you believe they represent Tax officers?) a stickler for detail, as illustrated by the unfortunate demise of APSC bargaining avatar Tammy.
Another challenge is that the growing pay gap between private sector pay and tax office pay for people with taxation system expertise and skills is becoming a growing friction point in hiring and retaining ATO staff, with consultancies and accounting firms constantly on the prowl for Tax quality staff.
Mismatched labour pricing estimates can be problematic for large agencies, because if they cannot hire or retain sufficient talent agencies then have to compete for contingent labour or contractors that then risk blowing out project costs and delivery times.
While tax retains a big in-house IT architecture, design and development team, it also has a big technical stream that deals with the actual construction and delivery of the Tax System in terms of its rules, application, targeting, interpretation and determinations.
This means that the skillsets required within the ATO to run the organisation are progressively being propelled up the remuneration value chain, with the public service previously falling back on hired help for even core public service work, a trend that public service minister Katy Gallagher is seeking to reverse.
Ironically, Tax is one of the most systemically efficient agencies in the entire APS because it can track with exquisite detail the amount of money it collects over how much it spends, with technologies like data matching, artificial intelligence and scenario modelling all turbocharging tax efficiency.
That means that as efficiency grows, Tax’s workforce is by definition more productive, not that productivity was ever really debated or contested during the bargaining process this time round.
Unless there is an immediate breakthrough, which seems unlikely, the potentially arbitration-bound dispute could be one of the first things to greet the incoming commissioner Rob Heferen when he starts on March 1.
It will be a reminder that when it comes to selling pay deals, few public servants have such a forensic knowledge of what Australians are actually paid, and how different pay deals compare, not least because they collect the withholding element of that pay.
There is power in unionism, but there is also craft. The ASU might just be helping the ATO save itself from a bigger skilled labour shortage and market-rate contractor bill down the road.
As Services Australia learned the hard way, with IT and call centre staff, once certain skills leave an organisation, they can take literally decades to replace.
READ MORE:
ATO staff vote on taking APS wage offer to Fair Work Commission
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