Disability sector bosses ask Fair Work to gut award

Labor and Coalition governments claim that the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) will dramatically improve the lives of people with a disability. As the scheme spreads, these promises are proving to be baseless. The NDIS is being used to undermine services and cut the pay and conditions of workers in the sector.

After an initial trial in 2013 across four relatively small regions, the NDIS is being expanded and will roll out across the country over the next three years. The scheme operates on an individualised funding model in which the government directs funding to individual service users instead of providing regular and ongoing funding to support services.

Even under the traditional recurring funding model, direct support and allied health workers in the disability sector had wages and conditions below others performing the same work in other comparable sectors, like public hospitals.

The roll-out of the NDIS has resulted in a more aggressive push by employers to hold down wages and increase productivity.

Employers have long relied on a characterisation of disability workers as “giving and caring” to refuse demands for pay parity. Small workplaces are also typical in the sector, which presents a challenge to organising workers industrially.

The roll-out of the NDIS has resulted in a more aggressive push by employers to hold down wages and increase productivity. Claiming that the NDIS requires support services to adopt a more flexible delivery model, employers are demanding that workers carry the burden of any changes. They want to cut penalty rates, reduce minimum shift hours and casualise their workforces. In a review currently before the Fair Work Commission, employers are arguing for a permanent downgrading of award wages and conditions in response to the NDIS.

Resistance to these changes by unions representing workers in the sector has been varied. However, as an increasing number of workers struggle against the NDIS tide, unions have responded by organising action in some workplaces and making public some criticisms of the scheme.

In Victoria, two of the state’s largest providers of therapy services have recently become a hotbed of contention. Occupational therapists, speech pathologists and physiotherapists at Yooralla and Scope have taken a stand against management’s patronising attitudes to the highly skilled work they perform. Union members in both organisations have taken industrial action as part of campaigns for new enterprise agreements.

At Yooralla sites where union members were formerly a boat-rocking minority, union members are now in the majority following a protracted and nasty bargaining process. In December 2014, Yooralla management suddenly found a way to meet “unaffordable” demands after workers took industrial action, including a stop-work at an AGM. Therapists at Scope are currently taking industrial action in response to management stalling negotiations.

The Health and Community Services Union, whose members represent the majority of direct support workers in the disability sector, are waging other battles too, including an ongoing campaign against the Victorian Labor government. After reversing a pre-election pledge to keep services public, the Andrews government is now using the NDIS as an excuse to privatise residential care for people with a disability.

In NSW, the Public Service Association, which represents disability sector workers, has also fought the state government’s plans to privatise all disability support services.

Unless unions and organised workers can push back against privatisation and wage-cutting, the NDIS and its individualised “cash-for-care” funding model will likely result in poorer quality disability services being delivered by stressed and underpaid workers trying to manage with fewer resources. Workers’ concerns about the post-NDIS landscape are also shared by many people with a disability and their advocates.