A group of federal public servants have said no to a proposal to give them half the wage rises being paid to their counterparts in other departments and agencies.
The rejection - by a 90 per cent majority - of a proposed new enterprise agreement for workers at the Federal Court of Australia indicates the three years of industrial strife in federal government workplaces may continue for some time.
The courts staff, who have not had a pay-rise since 2013, were asked to accept a new deal that offered an average payrise of 1 per cent for each of the proposed agreement's three years cuts to conditions and entitlements and, for some, a longer working week.
The landslide rejection, from a voter turnout of of 81 per cent in the 1187-strong workforce, comes after deals paying two per cent were accepted at the Defence Department, the Australian Taxation Office the Agriculture Department, the CSIRO and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
The main workplace union said the offer was "insulting" and the courts' management were trying to "ride on the coat tails" of other departments.
Announcing the ballot result on Friday morning the court executive director Darrin Moy said he and his colleagues would "revisit" their bargaining stance.
"We now need to revisit the Court's current position and will resume bargaining as soon as possible," Mr Moy wrote to staff on Friday.
"In the meantime, the current agreements will continue.
"You will be notified of any developments as soon as they occur."
Community and Public Sector Union Secretary Melissa Donnelly was scathing in her assessment of the outcome.
"This is a disaster for Courts bosses and it's now time for them to wake up and start treating their hard-working staff with respect," she said.
"This proposal was an absolute insult to staff, epitomised by the fact they were offering just half the meagre pay rise allowed by the Commonwealth bargaining policy.
"There were also a raft of harsh cuts to rights and conditions around things like consultation.
"We've had a run of Yes votes in other agencies in recent weeks – including Tax, Defence, Agriculture, CSIRO and Prime Minister and Cabinet – because they've done what they could on pay while recognising the core issue for staff is protecting hard-fought rights and conditions."
"Courts bosses need to look around and see what's working in these other agencies.
"This result makes it abundantly clear that they can't just ride on the coat-tails of successful ballots elsewhere when what they're pushing on staff is so out-of-step with what's even halfway reasonable."
Disputes also remain unresolved at the giant departments of Human Services and Immigration, which employ about 50,000 public servants between them.
An agreement at Human Services looks a distant prospect with little common ground between management and the union while the dispute at Immigration has been taken out of the the hands of departmental bosses and now subject to a lengthy arbitration process at the Fair Work Commission.
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