“[People are] sick of public sector workers and phony welfare scroungers sucking life out of economy.” Rupert Murdoch’s twitter response to Tony Abbott’s election shows just how keen Australia’s ruling class is on bleeding the public sector and its workers.

Exactly how workers can organise to resist these attacks is a real question across the country.

In Queensland, Campbell Newman champions “contestability” for key functions of government. “Contestability” is Can-Do Campbell speak for “testing whether someone else can [provide public services] for less money”. It’s the same story in Western Australia, where the audit commission of Liberal Premier Colin Barnett recommended “all areas of service delivery [be] opened to competition”.

The federal government is going the same way, with Joe Hockey floating the idea of government payments being delivered through Australia Post or Medibank Private rather than Centrelink.

In New South Wales a combination of job cuts and legislative changes promises to trash what remains of the public sector. Having announced 15,000 layoffs in 2012, Premier Barry O’Farrell shows no signs of slowing down. “I don’t think there’s ever an end point in trying to get the best possible efficiency across the system”, he said earlier this year.

Union response

The dominant union response is crossing fingers and hoping that workers are rescued by the future election of state Labor governments. This is a dead end.

The current NSW Public Service Association (PSA) strategy is a variant of this. Despite O’Farrell’s cuts agenda, capping pay and refusing to abide by Industrial Relations Commission rulings, the PSA recently postponed a planned half day stoppage. The 22 October strike was put off in favour of “good faith” negotiations with the government.

The PSA leadership, already lukewarm about a campaign of member action, undermined the 22 October action. They held off telling members about the strike. Then, less than a fortnight out, they decided to survey delegates about “postponing” the action in light of a government offer to enter talks.

Unsurprisingly, given the tepid response of the leadership and lack of serious preparation, delegates supported “postponing” the action to an unspecified future date.

The meeting turned out to be a slap in the face. Treasurer and minister for industrial relations Mike Baird told the union that the government “cannot agree to the [six month] moratorium [on cuts and privatisations] because of our responsibility to deliver services that represent value for money”.

Baird relayed the government’s pleasure that the PSA would not strike, and a briefing on “fiscal constraints” was offered in place of a single concession. This was to be expected. Cancelling the strike was an invitation to reject the union’s demands.

After a spike in union growth around a strike last year, the PSA is now losing members to redundancy and retirement faster than it can recruit new ones. In many public sector workplaces, there are no union delegates, let alone any recent history of activity or industrial action.

There is a long way to go in rebuilding strength. The answer is not to bow out, but to be involved and part of reorienting the union. This project is urgent. We don’t have time, nor is it possible to rebuild a stronger union first and then respond to the cuts later.

The need to fight

The only force with the potential to fight the public service cuts is the workers under attack. Tempered negotiation will get us nowhere. Unions need to establish themselves as leaders in the fight to defend public services.

Building up rank and file strength in the workplace will be necessary to pressure the government, but also our own leaders when they try to sideline members in favour of negotiation and litigation.

This means doing the everyday work that involves members: holding workplace meetings, electing local delegates, preparing fact sheets linking the broader campaign to our own workplaces, having one on one conversations, sign-making working bees and anything else that helps to galvanise people.

In the face of union leadership opposition, broad industrial action won’t be feasible this year. But we shouldn’t sit back, waiting to be called for an all-out strike. Instead, we should build smaller rolling actions in our workplaces, such as lunchtime walkouts, which can build to larger stoppages.

We need to learn that passivity will not protect us. Quite the opposite: if we want to save our jobs and protect services, it will mean exercising the power that 40,000 PSA members have to disrupt business as usual.