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.

Kat Henderson

Queensland hospital withholds wages

The same-sex marriage campaign has been exceptional in recent Australian politics, giving rise to sustained mobilisations involving tens of thousands of people in spirited protest. It has repeatedly forced the question of LGBTI equality into the public spotlight, despite the wishes of the political establishment. Marriage equality is now an issue with tremendous public support.
One of the greatest strengths of the campaign in Australia has been its focus on opposing homophobic discrimination. Unlike in the US, where the campaign is primarily driven by a desire to marry on the part of LGBTI people, the demonstrations in Australia have never focused on the virtues of marriage. Rather, the rallies have created a platform for a broader understanding, and denunciation, of the various manifestations of homophobia in society today.
Representatives from the trade union movement have spoken on the corrosive effect of homophobia in the workplace. Sports players such as Jason Ball have spelled out the isolating and divisive impact of homophobia in the AFL. High school students have spoken of the crippling under-confidence they feel at being the targets of discriminatory policies in schools. Trans activists have shared their experiences of being forced to assign themselves to a gender they don’t identify with.
The systemic discrimination and ideological vilification that LGBTI people experience is a reflection of the control capitalism exerts over people’s sexuality - being forced to conform to gender and sexual stereotypes, having specific age of consent laws, seeing our freedom to choose our own relationships restricted by laws limiting access to adoption, surrogacy and marriage rights, having to get permission from a medical board to identify our own gender. We can’t even have control over the most intimate and personal aspects of our lives, and this makes it easier for the system to control us more broadly.
Homophobia, like all forms of oppression under capitalism, serves to divide the working class, making us fight amongst ourselves rather than uniting against our common enemy at the top of society. According to one study carried out by the Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, more than two-thirds of lesbians and more than 50 percent of gay men had experienced homophobic hostility or violence, including ridicule, sexual harassment, accusations of pedophilia and physical abuse. A significant proportion reported being denied workplace entitlements.
Struggle in the workplace and on the streets is crucial to breaking down homophobic attitudes. If workers are involved in any sort of dispute or industrial action to improve their pay and conditions, or over a political issue, the practical importance of unity and mutual respect tends to become clear.
One of the greatest achievements of the same-sex marriage campaign has been its ability to win public support in almost every demographic of society. It has undermined the isolating effects of homophobia by uniting both straight and LGBTI people in a campaign for equality. And in turn, it has given confidence to LGBTI workers and students, both young and old, to come out and be proud, to challenge the discrimination we face on a daily basis.
This has created the basis for people to fight for more: for sexual liberation and human liberation more broadly. Yet as the campaign for marriage equality has shown, winning even the most basic rights under this system is a real struggle. Those parasites at the top of society who enforce oppression and benefit from it will never just give us our rights.
So the more we can beat back their oppressive agenda and challenge divisive ideas in society today, the better placed we are to unite in the struggles of the future.

Fight for equality, fight for liberation

A new study has found that students are more indebted, impoverished and financially stressed than ever before. Universities Australia’s University student finances report notes that between 2006 and 2012, the average real debt for an undergraduate student rose by $9,000 to $38,000.
The proportion of students in financial stress rose by approximately 12 percent to two-thirds of all students. Financial stress is even more widespread among Indigenous and low socioeconomic background students (79 percent and 77 percent respectively).
The report also found that 20 percent of students are forced to skip meals or other necessities.
Most pressing for students are extremely low incomes, with around two-thirds of students earning less than $20,000 a year compared to their average annual expenditure of $37,000.
This is compounded by the fact that a majority of students can’t access government income support payments. Only 33 percent of full-time domestic undergraduates received youth allowance, a meagre payment of $29 a day. It hasn’t been increased in more than 10 years.
Students are increasingly forced to seek paid employment to survive, in a job market in which youth unemployment is nearly 12 percent.
Those students who managed to find a job worked an average 16 hours a week during semester. A third of these students said they regularly missed classes because of work.
In a context in which the Labor government has announced a further $2.3 billion of cuts to tertiary education, the report paints a dire picture of student poverty.
These cuts include $7 million stripped from Indigenous and low socioeconomic support funding, and an attack on student welfare payments.
Next year, students who receive youth allowance will have their payment cut by $2,000 a year as the government converts the start-up scholarship into a loan.
The National Day of Action against the cuts to higher education provides an important opportunity for those who want a more equitable, accessible and fully funded education system to stand together and demand action.

Queensland hospital withholds wages

Fight for equality, fight for liberation

Student poverty soars

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