The meeting took place as arbitration hearings to settle their wage dispute with the government began inside WAIRC. The hearings are expected to last for six days and are a result of Troy Buswell’s failure to negotiate with these workers.
LHMU members, Eric Ripper, the leader of the opposition, and Dave Kelly, secretary of the LHMU addressed the meeting, which celebrated the successes in a seven month long campaign to win a better pay deal than the paltry 2.5%, 2.5%, 3% pay rise offered by the government.

Once again, the government tried to bully the workers to stop them from attending the meeting, which they are entitled to go to under the terms and conditions of their agreement. The school support workers can attend one paid union meeting per year. For 2010, this meeting was the one that was held on St George’s Terrace on Wednesday morning.
In Kenwick School, members were told they would be personally prosecuted and their pay would be stopped if they attended the meeting. Other members were told they had to take unpaid and unauthorised leave if they wanted to attend.

This was after the education department had approved the paid meeting on February 22. They then cancelled that approval on March 3.
Dave Kelly, secretary of the LHMU said: “This is yet another example of the strong arm, bullying tactics this government has shown throughout our campaign.
“We suspect that the premier Colin Barnett and the treasurer Troy Buswell found out that we were holding our permitted annual meeting outside the commission and we think they ordered the education department to cancel it. If they don’t pay members we will prosecute the government.
“It’s disgusting that school support workers at Kenwick Shool are being targeted and intimidated in this way. But the fact that 15 of them attended the meeting just shows how angry they are about the government refusing to negotiate in good faith, stopping the pay of workers who engaged in minor work bans and employing the services of expensive lawyers to argue their case in arbitration.”
One Kenwick School education assistant said: “The bullying behavior has simply made us stronger. We’ve actually recruited four new members to the union who are furious at the way we are being treated. 

“I’ve had fellow members ringing me at the weekends and crying because of what’s been happening. But we’re not going to give in.
“We’re not doing this for fun. We deserve to be treated professionally. And we’re disgusted that this government has employed the services of a lawyer whose expenses for one day would pay for each of our pay rises over three years.”
Well-known lawyer Harry ‘Jurisdiction’ Dixon, who usually works in the eastern states, has been brought over by the state government and paid around $8,000 a day to argue their case in arbitration.