More industrial strife is looming in the public service, after workers at the Australian Taxation Office were offered a pay rise of just 0.8 per cent a year.
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The deal comes with another 300 job losses and unions reacted angrily, calling the offer "nasty" and saying it represented an effective pay cut and set staff and management at the agency on a collision course.
The ATO's 23,000 workers were told on Tuesday morning that they will be expected to work longer hours and be stripped of conditions and entitlements in return for the pay offer of 2.4 per cent over the three-year life of the deal.
The offer is also conditional on staff working an extra nine minutes a day, a 2 per cent increase to the mandated working hours, and the loss of a $300 annual health and wellbeing allowance, to which the majority of ATO staffers are entitled.
After the loss of allowance, a typical ATO public servant in the middle band of an APS 6 classification can look forward to a pre-tax pay rise of about $7 a week.
The 13,000 tax officials below the APS 6 pay scale, who have not had a pay rise since June 2013, will have to make do with even less, with a worker in the middle of the APS 4 classification being asked to accept about $4.50 a week.
The Tax Office's 2500 part-timers are being asked to take a pay cut if they retain their current working patterns, because they will be working a smaller proportion of the increased working week.
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The Abbott government's Australian Public Service bargaining policy bans back pay, effectively freezing ATO wages from June 2013 until a new deal is put in place.
The ATO, which did not respond on Tuesday to requests for comment, puts the cost of the pay deal at about $88 million over its three-year life.
The Tax Office has already cut 3000 job cuts, and under the Abbott government's budget changes another 1700 will go by 2018.
The Tax Office's management must convince its workforce to vote yes to the deal in an industrial ballot, in the face of fierce opposition by unions.
The Australian Services Union's tax organiser Jeff Lapidos was first out of the blocks in condemning the proposal.
"The ATO remuneration proposal is miserably low, unfair, with dramatic cuts in conditions of employment," he said.
"I expect ATO employees will strongly reject the offer."
Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Nadine Flood said the offer amounted to a pay cut.
"Staff will be offered a 0.8 per cent per year pay increase for the next three years, but with working hours increased by 2 per cent," she said.
"Under this proposal part-time staff would actually see their take-home pay cut."
"Meanwhile, the work and the pressure on staff to deliver much-needed revenue to the government continue to pile up."
