'Unions should make real reform their issue. We should insist on it.' - Larry Brown
Ottawa (Feb. 10, 2006) – Larry Brown, National Secretary-Treasurer of the National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE), spoke this week at a meeting of the Council of the Federation of International Civil Servants Associations (FICSA ) in New York.
The group includes 28 member associations and unions, and a further 41 staff associations and organizations with associate status.
Brown was representing the National Union and its international affiliate, Public Services International. His address focused on government restructuring and the response by public sector unions.
“I may not be an expert on your situation but in Canada public services, for 15 years or more, have been reformed, restructured, reinvented, reoriented, privatized, downsized, right-sized, restrained, downloaded, devolved, decentralized, revamped, and even regurgitated,” said Brown. “We have learned some things along the way.”
'Our members want to do a good job'
Brown advised the federation not to get trapped into defending the status quo, even when fighting a restructuring that was unacceptable.
“Management driven restructuring sometimes pushes us into defending a system that, before the proposed changes, we were ourselves criticizing,” said Brown.
“Unions should make real reform their issue”, he recommended. “We should insist on it. Our members want to do a good job and they will support our efforts to make their workplaces more effective.”
Public sector workers, whether national or international, may be employed by their organization, but they work for the public, Brown noted.
“We should defend the public’s right to effective public services,” he said. “We have no apology to make for defending our members, but we are also defending the public’s right to the effective operation of the services they require.”
Whistleblowers
Brown also noted that any organization claiming to want real reform has to have in place a genuine whistleblowers protection plan.
“An organization that claims to want to improve, but one that won’t promise and deliver real whistleblowers protection, is not being honest,” he told the group. “Employees need to know that they can bring forward examples of wrongdoing or unethical behavior without sacrificing their jobs or their incomes.”
Brown argued that public sector workers won’t win their fights by arguing behind closed doors: “We need to take our fights out to the public, to the people who will lose if the services are weakened, to the organizations that work with us, to the allied organizations. These need to be public campaigns where we get the public on our side.”
Brown laid out 10 ‘rules’ for dealing with management driven restructuring.
He ended with words from Tommy Douglas, former NDP premier of Saskatchewan, that seemed even more appropriate, given his audience: “Courage, my friends, it’s not too late to make a better world.” NUPGE
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