Red Cross cuts skilled workforce
As a skilled worker making life saving blood products for one of Australia’s most prominent aid organisations, you’d think your job was secure. If you happened to notice that your boss just posted an annual surplus of $18 million and that it was banking on demand for its products doubling over the next decade, you might even think your future was rock solid. Think again.
Early in November, workers at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service were stunned by news that 70 of the service’s highest qualified staff will be made redundant within months. The dumped workers’ will be replaced by 50 newly created lower classified positions on significantly less pay. The executive director of manufacturing at the Red Cross, Jacqui Caulfield, described the job losses as “the next phase of our journey”. Shocked staff, whose journey with the Red Cross is coming to an abrupt end, are taking little comfort in Caulfield’s encouragement of staff to “work together to support each other through this important journey”.
Craig McGregor, secretary of the Victorian Health Professionals Association, speaking to the Age, cut through the hollow verbiage about the Red Cross’s grand odyssey and labelled the restructure “a really shifty manoeuvre”.
In a clear wage-slashing tactic, the Red Cross is looking to add to its surplus by deskilling its workforce. Highly skilled Blood Service workers on grades 3, 4 and 5 can earn as much as $101,000 a year. The new positions will be classified as grades 1 or 2 laboratory and processing workers. These workers will earn as much as $55,000 less than those they are replacing.
This announcement is the latest example of a trend emerging across the health care sector, where stories of skilled worker redundancies are stacking up.
At the smaller end of the scale is Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, where three specialist counsellors were recently forcibly made redundant in a bid to save costs. At the other end is Melbourne Health’s announcement that it plans to save $8 million by making up to 100 workers redundant.
Unless they fight, Red Cross Blood Service workers are facing a demoralising choice: take a package or compete with each other and new applicants for one of the 50 new lower paid jobs. A testing but courageous move would be to stand together and fight hard to retain their current conditions within the new organisational framework.
If these workers are prepared to struggle collectively, with the unions backing them, perhaps they can show the Red Cross a bit about the meaning of its own slogan – “the power of humanity”.
