United Voice

At the meetings, the workers endorsed putting three questions out to ballot:
1/ To demand the government begins negotiating properly;
2/ Whether to accept or refuse the trade-offs;
3/ Whether to take further action if the government doesn’t come up with a better offer.
The current offer on the table from the state government is a paltry 50c p/h pay rise this year (2.5%, 2.75% and 3% over three – the government’s state wages policy). The health support workers want a $50 per week increase each year for the next three years.

Workers at metro and country hospitals are having to afford huge utility bill rises imposed by the same government. And workers at 14 metro hospitals are also being asked to afford astronomical increases in their staff car parking fees. There is no provision for these rises in the government pay offer.
“We slog our guts out and what we get in return is a poor pay offer and the government wanting to take our conditions off us so they can down grade us,” said Lorraine Green, who works in catering at Fremantle Hospital.
“We deserve a fair go like everyone else. We do a very important job in the hospitals.
“The workers at Fremantle are very angry about the parking particularly because eventually we are going to be paying an extra $70 a fortnight.”

In protest at the car parking raises, the workers also signed large parking tickets made out to Colin Barnett and the health minister Kim Hames. These will be issued to them at a later date.
The state government also expects these essential workers to trade-off on important conditions so they can privatise their jobs. 

They want to remove their right to a permanent job and instead be able to employ them on fixed term contracts and remove the language in the health support workers’ current agreement which says existing services cannot be privatised.
Dave Kelly, secretary of the LHMU said: “These workers know that privatisation means poorer health care, less pay and worse conditions in the long run.
“By removing the no privatisation language and demanding that no new employees are made permanent, they are clearing the way for an onslaught of privatisation in our hospitals. In Perth, they are already planning to privatise the new Fiona Stanley hospital, Midland Health Campus and the new childrens’ hospital, these particular trade-offs indicates that there could be more.
“Private companies have to make a profit and if they’re running cleaning at RPH for example, this could mean standards are compromised in pursuit of a healthy profit margin.
“The privatisation of cleaning services at Royal Perth Hospital by the Court government in the 1990s was found to be a key contributor to the VRE superbug outbreak in 2001 which saw 172 people infected and which cost $2.7m to clean up.
“Surely WA can afford better than this.”
The workers have been trying to negotiate a new pay deal with the Barnett state government over the last eight weeks but have so far only encountered government representatives who are not authorised to make decisions about pay and conditions. The representatives said they were “too busy” to turn up to a negotiation meeting on July 8.
The next negotiations meeting is taking place on August 5.