Up to 15,000 public servants in the government's biggest department are to vote in the bureaucracy's largest ever industrial ballot as their union urges members to strike.
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The Fair Work Commission granted consent on Tuesday afternoon for the ballot of Department of Human Services staff over an increasingly bitter wage dispute.
Bosses at DHS, which runs Centrelink, Medicare and the Child Support Agency, are desperate to avoid strike action and will be urging a "no" vote when the ballot is held in late October or early November.
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Other disruptions could include flouting office dress codes and ignoring managers' emails and phone calls, "re-queuing or transferring customers" or defying scheduled break times, as well as disrupting $150 billion in Centrelink payments and the $29 billion that the department pays out annually through Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.
However, the Fair Work Commission has ordered the union to give five days' notice, instead of the usual three days, of any disruption to the department's call centres.
A department spokesman said on Monday that he had nothing to add to the DHS comment on Friday that it was disappointed the union had decided to pursue industrial action.
Public Service Minister Eric Abetz urged the department's staff to vote "no" to strike action.
CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood said her union's members had a legitimate right to take industrial action.
"Staff don't take this action lightly but they've been pushed to the brink by an employer that wants to cut their rights, remove their protections around super and then insults them with a pay offer that will see them go backwards over the next three years," Ms Flood said.
"Human Services has led the charge to attack staff rights in line with the government's aggressive bargaining position.
"The staff of Medicare and Centrelink are working mums and dads on average wages, just trying to do a good job serving our community."
The dispute between the department and staff escalated after management put a below inflation pay offer on the table in July worth, at most, 1.18 per cent per year.
The proposal also wants rights and conditions stripped out of the department's enterprise bargaining agreement and requires public servants to work longer hours.
DHS bosses dropped a plan to hold a snap ballot on the proposal a few days later in the face of angry opposition in workplaces, blaming union intransigence.
Negotiations have stalled ever since.
The dispute is being monitored across the 160,000-strong Australian Public Service as DHS is the only major department to have made a concrete pay offer.
More than 116 department and agency workplace agreements expired in June. However, across the service, negotiations have stalled with bosses unable to come up with "productivity gains" tough enough to satisfy the Abbott government's hardline public sector industrial policies.
