Queensland hospital withholds wages
Two years ago Queensland public sector nurses and midwives won a pay rise of $30 a week – the equivalent of a 3 percent annual wage rise. More than 2,000 nurses and midwives working at Brisbane’s Mater Health Service’s public hospitals are yet to see a cent of it.
The Queensland Nurses Union (QNU), estimates that hospital management has withheld more than $1 million in pay, some nurses being owed $6,000. Their wages now sit 9 percent behind nurses and midwives employed directly by Queensland Health.
Mater Health Services manages what it describes as a number of “public and private collocated hospitals”. It does not deny receiving state government funding specifically earmarked for the wages of nurses working in the public hospitals it manages. However, hospital management has refused to pass on the money unless nurses and midwives make significant concessions in their current enterprise agreement negotiations.
Mater Health wants to remove “no forced redundancies” clauses from any future enterprise agreement, reduce long service and maternity leave entitlements and cut nurses’ and midwives’ professional development allowance.
The LNP government is forging ahead with plans to shift more public health services to privately managed facilities like Mater. QNU secretary Beth Mohle has said that the Mater “situation highlighted the danger of government outsourcing”.
Health minister Laurence Springborg has refused to intervene in the dispute. Instead, the state government is allowing hospital management to hold public money to ransom in its push to undermine their workers’ conditions.
Workers at the Mater hospitals have refused to concede to management’s attack on their entitlements. They have twice voted against the enterprise agreement offer put to them. The union recently held a protected action ballot. Mohle told Red Flag that 83 percent of workers who returned a ballot voted in favour of industrial action.
However, to prevent nurses from attending stop-work meetings, Mater Health has engaged the same law firm that advised Qantas during the major 2011 dispute in which Qantas locked out its entire workforce. Industrial action in the form of wearing campaign badges and non-uniform T-shirts continues while the case is in conciliation at the Fair Work Commission.
