Public health allied professionals have secured a new enterprise agreement with the Victorian government. The deal was finalised on 4 August, minutes before a mass stop-work meeting, which had been called to discuss escalating industrial action. Around 600 union members marched through the CBD to celebrate the announcement. 
The agreement includes a number of measures on which the union – the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association – refused to budge, including limits on the use of fixed term contracts and restrictions on the de-skilling of advanced practice areas. The protections against de-skilling are important at a time when hospitals are increasingly seeking to replace skilled staff with lower paid allied health assistants. 
The four-year deal also improves time-in-lieu rates, dispute resolution procedures, job classifications and professional development leave entitlements. Pay rates will go up 12.5 percent over the life of the agreement. While modest, the pay rise is an advance on the 2.5 percent a year figure many public sector workers are taking at the moment. After years of notoriously dodgy leadership under Kathy Jackson, it’s a wage rise higher than many union members have come to expect. “I’ve never seen anything close to a 3 percent pay rise, ever”, said one member who has worked in the sector for almost a decade. 
The pay and conditions of Victorian allied health professionals are still catching up with those of most of our interstate colleagues, but this agreement and the campaign leading to it have shown that union members are up to the task. It is a victory for workers fighting hard to regain ground given up by the union leadership that negotiated our last two enterprise agreements. 
Union membership increased over the campaign, as did the activity and visibility of members in their workplaces. While we haven’t won everything back, we have taken important steps in rebuilding our union and developing an active membership. Fighting health sector unions will be important as we fend off ongoing attacks on the public health system.

Cecilia Judge

Allied health workers reclaiming lost ground

Members of the Victorian Allied Health Professionals Association (VAHPA) held a mass meeting at Trades Hall on 28 April to discuss enterprise agreement negotiations. The union is bargaining with the Victorian Hospitals Industrial Association and the state government.
Union members voted unanimously to empower the leadership to start the process to authorise industrial action as part of the campaign. The union represents a number of different groups of allied health workers in public and community health, including radiographers, physiotherapists, social workers and occupational therapists. 
VAHPA is the new name adopted by the Health Services Union Branch 3, which became notorious after the corruption of former union leaders including Kathy Jackson was exposed. The old leadership has been cleared out, and the new union is keen to establish itself as a serious union willing to fight for its members. For allied health workers, there’s a lot to fight for.
The previous two agreements negotiated under the former leadership were grubby deals that allowed wages and conditions to fall dramatically behind workers represented by other HSU branches.
This bargaining round, union members are fighting for pay parity with allied health workers in other branches and to scrap some of the worst clauses that crept into previous agreements, including a provision that limits the union’s ability to raise disputes at the Fair Work Commission without the employer’s consent. Also important are clauses relating to workloads. Currently, allied health workers are expected to cope with growing patient numbers without any additional resources.
Part of the task of reclaiming the union for its members involves growing membership numbers and training union activists. To increase the union’s visibility, members are encouraged to wear their union T-shirts to work on T-shirt Tuesday. Already, there are reports that this is creating a sense of unity between union members and proving a useful way to start discussions about the campaign with other workers, patients and the public.
The union’s leadership has also raised the idea of allied health workers campaigning alongside nurses, who are also currently negotiating a new agreement. Any moves in this direction would be an important step forward for VAHPA.

Health workers’ first fight after ditching dodgy leadership

In February Wyndham City Council, in Melbourne’s west, sacked one of its parks and gardens workers. The council had employed a spy to orchestrate a frame-up and manufacture a reason to see him off. In October, the Fair Work Commission ordered that he get his job back.
News of the court case made it into the mainstream media. So too did reports of the obscene amount of money spent by the council on hiring a spy and then hiring lawyers to defend hiring a spy.
Left out of the story that most people heard was an account of what union members back at the council depot were doing about it all. Rob Monohan, delegate at Wyndham, was this year recognised as a joint Australian Services Union (Victorian and Tasmanian) delegate of the year because of his efforts organising action against the council.
Rob has worked at Wyndham for 23 years. He’s been a union delegate for 12. Rob started his working life as a member of the BLF and says he carried what he learnt about unionism then to his job at the council.
Over the years, Rob has built a solid reputation in his workplace and knows that he has the support of his workmates: “I’m just the button pusher. I can’t do what I do without the members behind me.”
In February, Rob arrived at work one day to be told by his manager to cancel whatever he had on. Management had lined up five separate meetings with union members to discuss “allegations of misconduct” against them. Rob sat through meeting after meeting in which outrageous accusations were thrown around and each worker was threatened with the sack.
Four of the five agreed to take a package, but one, Phil, had been at the council for 25 years and faced losing the most. He didn’t agree to a package and was promptly sacked. Rob said he knew they would have to fight to get him back. He went straight back to the depot workers to relay the outcome of the meetings. The union applied to the Fair Work Commission to dispute the sacking, but Rob knew that, if left to run its own course, the case could drag on endlessly. All the while Phil would be languishing without a job.
He also knew the depot workers had the industrial strength to put considerable pressure on the council. The first step was work bans. But when workers heard rumours that the council was planning to dock pay because of the bans, they decided to get in first. Rob describes the sentiment: “Fuck you. If we’re losing money, we’re shutting this joint down!”
A meeting was held, a vote was taken, and everyone walked out that night. The next day, they picketed from 8am. It was the most significant industrial action taken by Wyndham City Council workers in living memory. And it worked.
“By 1pm, we were summoned into Fair Work. So what we’d done had gotten the response we wanted.” The snap walkout had forced Fair Work to take notice and bring the case on sooner. Phil is now in the process of being reinstated with full back pay and all leave entitlements reimbursed.
Union coverage in the depot has risen from about 70 to 95 percent. At one stage, Rob said, they ran out of membership forms because people weren’t signing up online but were approaching union members directly to talk about joining.
Importantly, many of the new members are young people and women, two groups that the workers in the depot hadn’t been as successful at recruiting in the past.
Things in the depot haven’t been the same since, and Rob says that workers are pretty anxious since they discovered the length to which management will go to victimise individuals. He hopes things turn around and knows the strength of the union will be important in that.
Asked what the biggest lesson he’s learnt, he answered confidently, “Don’t trust management!”

Don’t trust management – beat it

Whoever said that battles are won in the street, not the courtroom, had sage advice for community sector workers. More than a year after a significant legal victory, we’re still fighting for equal pay.
Last year, Fair Work Australia (now the Fair Work Commission) recognised that workers in the community sector are paid considerably less for doing the same work as workers in other sectors like government and health. It was a historic decision. The commission accepted that the wage disparity was due to the fact that most community sector workers are women.
The win came on the back of a five year campaign that drew in thousands of workers. We rallied, we argued, we recruited to the union (Australian Services Union) and we made equal pay an issue that wouldn’t go away. Our campaign undid the idea that community workers are in the job for an emotional reward and should be grateful for whatever we get. The ASU grew at a rate that defied the trend in union membership. It became relevant to many workers for the first time because it became a union that fought.
However, our fight is far from over. The legal decision, significant as it was, left a loophole, a way out for community sector bosses. The wording means that community sector agencies can try to absorb extra funding that is supposed to pay for our wage increases.
Furthermore, workers in the sector are currently being transitioned to a “modern” award as part of the award “modernisation” process started by the Labor government in 2008. A number of agencies are using this as a chance to reclassify workers at lower levels. Lower classifications will mean workers lose thousands over the phase-in period set down by the commission’s equal pay decision.
All of this will chip away at the pay and conditions of workers who are currently paid above award rates and setting the standard for the sector. This, in turn, will lower pay and conditions for everyone.
What makes these attacks particularly loathsome is that they are coming from the very agencies that once claimed to be partners in the fight for equal pay. In the lead-up to the court case, most community sector bosses signed on as supporters of equal pay. They wrote letters to politicians, and some even let workers attend the street rallies in paid time.
But that was when an equal pay campaign meant a fight with government for more funding for the sector. That’s a fight that community workers and our union have largely won. Now the bosses have changed their tune. Equal pay for community workers suddenly matters less than padding the bottom line of the organisations they work for with the extra funding meant for wages.
However, it’s not all bad news; the struggle for equal pay is continuing in the workplace. ASU members at the Tenants Union of Victoria took strike action and set an important precedent for an enterprise bargaining clause to protect equal pay and prevent the absorption of extra funding. Workers at Mind Australia have also taken industrial action. They are right now in the middle of a battle for an enterprise agreement that preserves the benefits of the equal pay decision as well as their existing conditions. These struggles serve as important examples and lessons for all of us.
As long as our bosses continue their fight, ours too does not end, not until every last cent of equal pay is in our pockets, not theirs.

Allied health workers reclaiming lost ground

Health workers’ first fight after ditching dodgy leadership

Don’t trust management – beat it

Equal pay decision means nothing without a fight

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