A radical move by the Department of Communications to force at least 550 staff to reapply for their own jobs as a way to help jettison as many as 125 positions has raised fresh fears that public service downsizing will become decidedly nasty and bitter if the tactic is deployed in other agencies.

The Department of Communications late last week issued staff with a guide to how the spill-and-fill process would operate, leaving unsuccessful candidates the unpalatable options of taking a redundancy, accepting redeployment or most controversially accepting a position at a lower grade – effectively a demotion.

The Community and Public Sector Union has slammed the move to open up all Department of Communications positions for contest, saying the restructuring sought to cull up to 25 per cent of departmental staff.

The use of the overtly private sector spill-and-fill mechanism is well established in large corporations, and often follows mergers and acquisitions where efficiencies of scale are pursued to remove duplication.

Its main benefit is that staff with skills that can be transferred can be progressed up the managerial ladder while employees contemplating retirement or resignation can be let go quickly.

While there have been selected applications of the spill-and-fill tactic in government with parts of agencies, the CPSU believe that its application at the Department of Communications is unprecedented and the first time it has been applied to an entire department.

“We understand that the priorities of government departments change but this is not the way to treat hard-working professionals,” said CPSU National President Alistair Waters.

“We call upon the Department to immediately rethink this process. If jobs need to be cut, then the Department should first ask people to apply for redundancy rather than go down this divisive route.”

The potential for division among department employees is a tangible worry for the union because it could be used as a tactic to try and splinter an otherwise unified front as negotiations over redundancies and the public service’s main industrial agreement come to a head between the May Budget and the end of financial year.

The Abbott government has made no secret of its intention to try and restrain the influence of unions in workplaces across Australia and sections of the Coalition are known to be barracking for major reforms to begin in the government’s own backyard.

One department believed to be similarly keen for a spill and fill process is the Department of Health where so-called ‘unfunded’ employees have been sent to a special business services unit that has been bluntly nicknamed ‘the pound’.

However a big problem with the application of spill-and-fill tactics is that if affected staff are subsequently allocated new jobs at a less senior rank and salary, there is potential for superannuation and other entitlements to be reduced.

The Department of Communications has been regarded as a prime target for more hard line tactics for restructuring because of the previous Labor government’s heavy promotion of the National Broadband Network as a Fibre to the Home as a key economic policy to help transform service delivery and business.

While Prime Minister Tony Abbott ultimately backed away from initial promises to get now Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull to “demolish” the massive project in favour of a marginally less expensive and slower Fibre to the Node rollout for the NBN, the Coalition has long complained about what it perceives as technological zealotry over fibre in sections of the media and the technology industry.

That view has been partly fueled by previous Communications minister Stephen Conroy strong position that advice on technology developments and regulation needed to come from physicists and scientists employed directly by the department as well as lawyers and consultants.

It is believed that many of the department s positions created as a direct result of Labor and Senator Conroy’s policy settings are those that will come under the most pressure.

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