UNITING AGEWELL WORKERS HOPE TO WALK OFF OVER MEAL BREAK CUTS AND INSULTING PAY

Workers at Uniting AgeWell (UAW) have shown their mainland management that they won’t be bullied over their enterprise bargaining agreement with insulting pay offers and proposed cuts to their meal break entitlements.

HACSU members across the state at UAW worksites voted as a majority against their management’s dodgy new agreement at the end of December 2022. The underhanded deal that UAW tried to rush through would’ve seen entitlements go backwards, a pay cut in comparison to inflation and cost-of-living, and the removal of meal break entitlements.

It’s the third time in twelve months they’ve tried to trick workers into voting their breaks away, but HACSU members stood up and fought hard against their divisive tactics.

Meal breaks are central to any workplace, but particularly in the care sector. Workers need fair and proper conditions to be able to provide their best care to our most vulnerable – that’s why UAW staff are bravely standing up to say that paid meal breaks protect resident care.

UAW have already cut some workers’ breaks and tried to create further hostility, but workers are fighting to get meal breaks for every worker –including people who don’t get them now. And we know that the residents they care for, and the larger community, supports this too.

They pulled out all the stops to try and scrape this latest agreement by: attempting to buy out workers’ meal breaks, flying down an upper management team from Melbourne to pressure people, calling and texting workers at all hours in their personal time to vote yes, and even trying to bribe staff with free coffee. But if they spent the same number of resources on a meaningful pay rise and on improving conditions workers say it would mean a lot more to them than veiled pressure and bribes.

Throughout COVID-19 we know that aged care workers continued to perform essential work in high demand environments. They’re usually the first on the ground dealing with outbreaks in residential care, have a whole new workload due to COVID, and are often working in uncomfortable PPE day-in and day-out because they care about helping our older Tasmanians.

Meanwhile, UAW’s upper management showed their “appreciation” for essential aged care staff from the comfort of their offices, making insulting decisions about their worker’s livelihoods. Deciding to further cut breaks, offering miserly wage “increases”, and slashing conditions for their exhausted workforce on the ground was all they saw fit to offer – even after all the hard work they see UAW workers do.

Management are clearly out of touch with the current struggles and cost-of-living crisis their own workforce is facing in Tasmania. It’s not good enough.

And they’re not finished with their trickery yet. In February, UAW tried to ram through yet another vote on the same terrible agreement – but HACSU members refused to cop it and we took them to the Fair Work Commission where it was decided they’d have to scrap the vote and negotiate.

HACSU members at Uniting AgeWell are now voting on taking industrial action.

If they continue with their onslaught against workers in bargaining, staff across their facilities have resolved to take further protected industrial action and stop-works to stand up for fairer working conditions and wages. It’s not a choice members take lightly, but it’s one they’ll be forced to make if UAW refuse to stop going after their breaks and legal entitlements.

We need to value essential aged care workers – they deserve our support now more than ever.

That’s why HACSU will continue to fight for aged carers and their residents, always.

Sometimes, it just takes one person speaking up to change a workplace.

When an aged care employer botched public holiday pays over the Christmas break, one union member found a problem with her pay. When she checked her payslip, she’d only been paid a flat Sunday rate for working on Christmas Day – not public holiday rates, like she should’ve been.

Each year, the government lists the official public holidays (or “gazetted holidays”) for the year and these are the days that must be paid at public holiday rates. But obviously this employer hadn’t been paying attention.

Our member had seen HACSU information about when you should be paid public holiday rates and knew what had happened wasn’t right, so she took it up with management and got HACSU involved.

It wasn’t long before the employer put out an all-staff notice letting everyone know that they had made a mistake with pay for Christmas Day and they’d be paying everyone the money they owed.

Sometimes all it takes is a question.

But sometimes, you have to push a little harder – like Ellen, who works at Eskleigh in disability services.

Ellen’s question about her travel allowance led to an 18-month argy bargy with her employer – and an eventual payout of tens of thousands of dollars to dozens of workers after HACSU got involved.

Ellen realised that she wasn’t being paid her travel allowance properly when she’d start or finish her workday at clients’ homes, and she started asking questions of her employer in 2021. Her employer insisted she didn’t qualify for the travel allowance, but Ellen wasn’t convinced – so she got in touch with HACSU. We investigated it ourselves and found that Ellen was absolutely right: she was being underpaid.

Under her workplace agreement, her