Three hundred staff at the Australian Red Cross have been sacked as the federal government unleashes its latest attack on asylum seekers. The Home Affairs Department has implemented sweeping cuts to asylum seeker assistance services. 
Seeking asylum in Australia is a notoriously slow and complex process. After lodging a protection application, an asylum seeker can wait two years before their first interview. If the first decision on their case is negative, appeals add years to the process. 
Asylum seekers can apply for the Home Affairs’ Status Resolution Support Services (SRSS) program, which includes a Centrelink payment; this too is a long and complicated process. Most applications for the SRSS program are refused. 
Those lucky enough to receive support will receive a Centrelink payment only 89 percent of what a permanent resident gets.
Contracts to run SRSS are given to social welfare providers, including the Red Cross. Home Affairs closely monitors the contracts, requiring providers to adhere to strict guidelines and meet so-called key performance indicators. 
But without support, many asylum seekers struggle to make their way through the maze of systems and schemes, which are difficult to navigate. 
Now, Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton has decided that even this meagre assistance is too much. Dutton has ordered all asylum seekers with work rights to get a job (as if it were that easy). Over the next few months, all asylum seekers with work rights will be cut off SRSS payments and support, unless they meet strict eligibility criteria. 
At the moment, there is one job vacancy for every seven unemployed people in Australia. Imagine how hard it is to secure this job when your qualifications aren’t recognised, or you have health issues, or cannot speak a word of English or if your work rights last only three months at a time. 
Sound reasonable? Even Dutton probably doesn’t think so. But these changes have one purpose: to make life unbearable for asylum seekers. 
As of February, there were 13,299 asylum seekers receiving SRSS. These numbers are expected to drop drastically. This is how Home Affairs can now justify ending its contract with the Red Cross. 
In Victoria, two other providers, AMES Australia and Life Without Barriers (LWB) have kept their contracts and will get Red Cross’ remaining clients. AMES and LWB are hiring new staff to support the influx of Red Cross clients, but these workers are being offered only three-month contracts. 
Existing AMES staff are also being asked to apply for their own jobs again, and those who succeed will be placed on these three-month contracts. Meanwhile, the majority of LWB staff are on maximum term contracts, allowing for their dismissal with notice at any time. AMES and LWB staff have been told to expect job losses as asylum seekers are steadily thrown off support. 
It will take a united and determined campaign to demand that asylum seekers have access to support and that the workers who provide it are not subject to precarious and shifting working conditions.

ASU member

Dutton attacks workers and asylum seekers with one blow

Call centres: the ultimate 21st century dead end job. When you work in one, it can feel like the only people with less meaningful jobs are the people you report to.
Every minute you’re paid to be in their fluorescent hell hole is measured and categorised on a binary: “available” (to take calls) or “exception” (bathroom break). Typically, 3 percent of your day is allowed to be expended on the time it takes to get back from tea breaks and deal with bodily functions.
While this sweat shop regimentation will be familiar to anyone who has ever worked in an Australian call centre, the benefits of union organisation may not be. Union membership in the call centre industry is lower even than the national membership rate of 17 percent. Many workers, particularly those doing work that has been outsourced by other companies, have never worked under a union collective agreement and rely only on the national employment standards (NES) for protection.
The NES is what the government calls a “safety net”. It is a bare minimum and provides our employing class with the right to pay people just enough to feed and clothe themselves and turn up to work.
My first call centre job was for a company called Stellar, a recipient of outsourced work. Its business model is to take on work, outsourced by the public and private sector; work that would previously have been performed by workers covered by enterprise agreements, and do that work at fire sale prices. You bet they paid minimum wages, and fought to keep it that way. At Stellar, the quickest way to be shown the door was to talk to the wrong person about joining the union.
In Stellar’s employ, I worked on a contract for a well known electricity and gas retailer. We performed the function of the sales team, without getting commissions; we dealt with distraught customers in financial hardship without being paid as their credit team; we handled serious customer complaints without being paid as managers. Because we lacked a strong enough union, management were able to fudge job demarcations. Those who could not manage the jobs of multiple other departments as well as their own, within an average call time of 497 seconds, would be publicly berated.
The tea room gossip was always about how terrible the pay was, how much of a mess the company was to work for and which supervisors were most hated. But the union could never get enough of a foothold, and when it came time for a vote on terms and conditions, the company-proposed NES-based agreement was approved. So bad was the deal that wages were frozen for three of its four years.
Since leaving Stellar, I’ve got a job at a call centre with a union-negotiated agreement. It’s another electricity and gas company, but because the site has a union history, the pay is more than 30 percent higher, with a minimum annual pay rise of 3 percent. Job demarcations are strictly enforced, reducing the stress associated with taking hundreds of calls each week.
Importantly, workers have an understanding that union organisation matters. We have won the right to have a union noticeboard, for delegates to attend to industrial matters at work and to talk to new workers about the union. 
If you only do yourself one favour as an entry level worker, join your union and help others see the reason to do so as well.

Lucas Anderson

A tale of two call centres

More than 1000 marched in Sydney on 15 February to oppose any attack on Medicare and the public health system. The crowd gathered at Town Hall steps where a sea of union flags were visible.
Speakers outlined the horrors of health care before Medicare, and foreshadowed those to come if proposals to introduce a Medicare co-payment and further privatise the public health system are implemented.
Dr Con Costa from the Doctors Reform Society recounted that in the 20th century the most common reason for imprisonment in South Australia before Medicare was introduced was for non-payment of fines related to unpaid medical bills. Brett Holmes from the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association described what a privatised heath system would look like – overcrowded emergency rooms, a worsening of chronic health conditions overall in the community and more deaths due to non-treatment amongst the poor.
As hundreds of placards in the crowd attested, Abbott's lies that Australia can’t afford a public health system are an ideological smokescreen for his plans to funnel billions more into the coffers of private health insurance companies.
The reality of Abbott's plans to line the pockets of the rich whilst dismantling a health care system funded by workers, fuelled a vibrant and angry march through the city, led by activists from the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association, the ASU, Unions NSW, the Greens and Socialist Alternative.
Chants of “No ifs, no buts, no Medicare cuts”, rang out as passing motorists blasted their horns in support and bus drivers took placards from protestors, displaying them on their windscreens as they cheered on marchers.

Simone McDonnell

Stop Abbott, save Medicare

Mind Australia social and community services workers held a stop-work meeting on 30 January to plan the next move in their enterprise agreement campaign.
Australian Services Union members have been bargaining with Mind – one of Victoria’s largest community sector employers – for nearly two years. “The thing about this is we only want what is fair and right, but they are making us fight for it”, explains Carmel.
Mind management has refused to participate in conciliation at the Fair Work Commission and has not met with workers and their union since September 2013.
While management’s obstinacy has angered workers, there’s no sign that they will buckle under the pressure. Union membership has grown by 50 percent since bargaining started, and in a feat unprecedented in the sector, workers have rejected management-backed proposed agreements in three separate votes.
Central to the dispute is management’s attempt to remove rostered days off and strip 12 days’ paid leave per year from every full-time worker. Lead delegate Adam Bottomley sums up the approach that has held Mind workers together so far: “Our united resistance has fought off most of the company’s attacks, but they are still after our RDOs. This campaign has proven that workers don’t get what they deserve; they only get what they fight for.”

Dutton attacks workers and asylum seekers with one blow

A tale of two call centres

Stop Abbott, save Medicare

Management out of its mind

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