Unintended consequences are still unacceptable
Published: 8 February 2010
Overhauling our country’s industrial relations laws and creating a national system of modern awards was never going to be an easy task for the federal government.
But when there are unintended consequences of these major changes, it’s only reasonable to expect they be resolved.
Many QNU members would have heard media reports about the Australian Industrial Relations Commission’s (AIRC) decision not to delay the implementation of new pay rates under the Nurses’ Award 2010, which could ultimately lead to wage cuts for some Queensland and New South Wales nurses.
While the majority of QNU members won’t be affected, the AIRC’s decision will apply to some members (mainly working in aged care facilities) who are not covered by an agreement.
Most of the conditions of the new nurses’ award applied from 1 January 2010 and included some significant improvements to entitlements and allowances.
The changes to wages and other clauses with significant financial implications will be phased in from 1 July this year, and it is during this transition that there exists potential for some reductions in wages or wage freezes for nurses covered by the new award.
As far as your Union is concerned, one member affected by these changes is one too many—particularly in the aged care sector, where nurses are already significantly underpaid compared with their colleagues of equivalent experience and classification elsewhere.
Given the first transition occurs on 1 July this year, we have some time now to plan and implement strategies to address this unacceptable situation in the short and long term.
This will start with us contacting employers who don’t have a current agreement which covers nurses (where nurses would be on the award) seeking an undertaking that they will not use the transitional arrangements to decrease existing pay and conditions.
We will also seek to negotiate enterprise bargaining agreements with these employers to ensure the wages and conditions of nurses in their workplaces are legally protected.
It is important that all QNU members realise the pay rates and conditions under any award represent the very minimum standards that can be provided by an employer. The employer can at any time offer higher standards, either through an agreement or some other arrangement.
For this reason we will continue to, as we always have, push to negotiate agreements in any workplace that covers QNU members.
Our Union is also seeking discussions with peak bodies in aged care to discuss our concerns and work through the detail of the transition to the new award.
In January, we met with Aged Care Queensland and arranged further discussions to address a number of complex issues associated with the transition arrangements.
The QNU, the New South Wales Nurses’ Association (NSWNA) and the Australian Nursing Federation have also written to Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard calling on the federal government, as the funder of aged care services, to adopt the requirement to implement the transitional arrangements recommended to the AIRC by the ANF, which the government supported.
We proposed that aged care providers receiving Commonwealth funding through the Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI) or the Resident Classification Scale (RCS) should be required to delay the transitional arrangements for wages in order to qualify for subsidies.
This approach would assist our Union to at least protect current wage rates and provide a better base on which to negotiate enterprise agreements in sites which don’t currently have them.
The current review of ACFI provides an avenue to enforce these requirements.
However, regardless of how the government responds to our requests, we will continue our hard work to ensure aged care nurses do not fall even further behind.
The future of our aged care system is dependent on the nurses working in it and the care they provide.
We will continue this fight.
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