The fictious public servant known as ‘Tammy’, who was used to sell a misconstrued, misleading and non-existent improvement in flexible working conditions to public servants in the hope of getting them to agree to the current rejected wage offer, has been jettisoned after the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) admitted to errors that overstated purported benefits to employees.
In an embarrassing twist to deadlocked wage negotiations, the APSC has conceded it wrongly told public servants they would get a better deal under flexible working arrangements only proposed in the current enterprise bargaining offer when, in fact, that same workplace right was already in effect.
The admission is highly problematic for the APSC and public service minister Katy Gallagher because it confirms the government, as an employer, misled public servants in official communications that were part of negotiations with its workforce.
The misleading statements were made in the APSC’s APS Bargaining News bulletin and were called out by the Tax Officers Branch of the Australian Services Union (ASU), which pulled up chief negotiator Peter Riordan on the matter and demanded the misleading information be corrected.
The APS Code of Conduct, of which the APSC is the official enforcer, states that APS employees must “behave honestly and with integrity in connection with APS employment” and must “not provide false or misleading information in response to a request for information that is made for official purposes in connection with the employee’s APS employment.”
ASU’s Tax Branch secretary Jeff Lapidos wrote to Peter Riordan on Thursday, and by lunchtime that day, the APSC had changed the wording of its claimed improvement in conditions for the example of Tammy to include her pre-existing rights under the National Employment Standards, which allow public servants to request modified hours of work if they are also carers.
In the example circulated by the APSC, Tammy is described as an APS call centre worker who finds “the hours she is rostered on clash with her caring responsibilities for her elderly mother” and asks for an earlier start and finish so she can better perform her carer’s duties under the new enterprise agreement — but the same workplace right is already available to her, hence the ASU’s umbrage.
Back at the APSC, plenty of people wanted a word with Tammy.
“We refer to our flexible work scenario 3 referring to Tammy in APS bargaining news: issue 30. We unintentionally communicated that Tammy could only apply for a flexible work arrangement if her new enterprise agreement comes into effect,” an APSC spokesperson told The Mandarin.
“Under the National Employment Standards, Tammy can currently apply for a flexible work arrangement to support caring arrangements. If the proposed enterprise agreement covering Tammy comes into effect, the new flexible work provisions would provide that Tammy’s request would be considered with a bias towards approval.”
“We will update the online version of the APS bargaining news: issue 30 and provide clarification in the upcoming APS bargaining newsletter: issue 31,” the APSC spokesperson said.
“Our correction in Newsletter 31 will appear as per the below, and a tracked version of our changes to the table in Newsletter 30 is also provided below for reference.” Which was kindly supplied, but didn’t last.
If the day started badly for Tammy, it was over by lunchtime.
By the afternoon, Tammy was off the books, out the door and incongruously expunged from the APSC’s online APS Bargaining News webpage.
The only trace left of Tammy, also known as “Scenario 3”, was a hole in the numerical sequence of fictitious exemplars. It now skips from “Scenario 2” (a woman called ‘Phi’) to “Scenario 4” (a bloke called ‘Brad’).
Tammy’s swift removal follows the ASU insistence the APSC swallow its own medicine over the bogus improvement claim that the union labelled “false and misleading” after first efforts at a face-saving remedy fell apart.
It is understood the ASU raised the matter of the APSC correcting the erroneous claims about Tammy “as a matter of integrity” with the APSC and did not accept the original modifications of the example of Tammy because these did not make it clear there was no additional benefit conferred on public servants.
Given the APSC was briefly hanging onto the example, albeit in watered-down form, the union pushed for a disclaimer to go with the newly modified version stating that the purported benefit was, in fact, an existing workplace right.
“The change made by the APSC does not make clear that ‘Tammy’ has an existing workplace right to a flexible working arrangement under the National Employment Standards (NES) of the Fair Work Act 2009. Scenario 3 does not explain that Tammy’s new enterprise agreement will contain an equivalent workplace right which makes no change of any significance at all to the workplace right Tammy currently has or to the obligations her APS Agency currently has to her under the NES,” correspondence from the ASU to the APSC said.
“So Tammy’s ‘new’ enterprise agreement will make no change in practice for her scenario. Tammy already has the right to request a flexible working arrangement in her situation. And there is no practical change which Tammy could expect in practice.”
Poor Tammy. Caught on the wrong side of an integrity question, staring the APS Code of Conduct in the face, and being the face of a prominent correction in official correspondence just when the minister needed a friend as her old union rolled strikes against her … well, there really wasn’t a whole lot of options.
Unless you’re an agency chief, or a former agency chief, and need due process to fully play out to stay on the payroll, a matter also at the APSC’s behest.
The Mandarin’s 2023 secretary’s salaries list is out today.
READ MORE:
Tax union demands APSC correct ‘misleading’ flexible work claims
