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.

Marni Jackson

Disability sector bosses ask Fair Work to gut award

Health minister Peter Dutton claims that the public health system is inefficient and unsustainable. Gutting Medicare and the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme isn’t enough to fix it. The federal government has also reneged on funding commitments, leaving the states to pick up the shortfall.
The Victorian Department of Health is already onto that, through its Health Workforce Reform Implementation Taskforce. One of its projects is to “reform” staffing in public hospitals. A report by Melbourne’s Grattan Institute claims that restructuring the workforce will save $430 million per year.
The recommended changes cover most hospital staff involved in direct care work: doctors, nurses and allied health professionals such as physiotherapists and occupational therapists. Despite claims that the changes would provide more satisfying jobs for workers, they’re actually all about pushing more patients through the hospital system as cheaply as possible.
The restructuring would mean that any tasks that can be performed by lesser qualified staff would always be assigned to those staff. We’re told that this would “free up” the professionals for more highly skilled patient care and management tasks. Given that an assistant’s pay is only around 60 percent of a health professional’s, it’s an obvious way to get tasks done on the cheap.
Already overworked professionals would be directed to work at their maximum level at all times, while their assistants would be asked to spend more of their time on tasks that were previously done by or with more highly qualified staff.
This already occurs in aged care. Often there is only one qualified nurse to monitor more than 30 residents, while the lesser qualified nurses and assistants do the care work. The same practices are starting to occur in public hospitals, if unofficially, due to the pressures associated with increased workloads and waiting lists.
Where there are extensive waiting lists for allied health services, the government is currently funding pilot projects to “train up” assistants to take on many of the tasks waiting for professional attention.
In time, more entry level jobs and relatively fewer higher paid professional positions will be created. Hospital workers will become more like cogs in the health care machine, rather than individuals contributing a unique set of skills to a health care team.
The professionals will no longer be able to monitor closely patients’ conditions and their response to treatments. This is likely to result in worse health care. For example, in the physiotherapy area where I work, I know of one patient who developed a pressure sore from ill-fitting equipment due to lack of skilled monitoring. Another patient lost mobility due to lack of skilled assistance to practise walking.
They call it “reform” – a word which ought to imply improvement. Let’s call it what it is – another attack on health workers and patients.

Health workers ‘reform’ already under way

As a skilled worker making life saving blood products for one of Australia’s most prominent aid organisations, you’d think your job was secure. If you happened to notice that your boss just posted an annual surplus of $18 million and that it was banking on demand for its products doubling over the next decade, you might even think your future was rock solid. Think again.
Early in November, workers at the Australian Red Cross Blood Service were stunned by news that 70 of the service’s highest qualified staff will be made redundant within months. The dumped workers’ will be replaced by 50 newly created lower classified positions on significantly less pay. The executive director of manufacturing at the Red Cross, Jacqui Caulfield, described the job losses as “the next phase of our journey”. Shocked staff, whose journey with the Red Cross is coming to an abrupt end, are taking little comfort in Caulfield’s encouragement of staff to “work together to support each other through this important journey”.
Craig McGregor, secretary of the Victorian Health Professionals Association, speaking to the Age, cut through the hollow verbiage about the Red Cross’s grand odyssey and labelled the restructure “a really shifty manoeuvre”.
In a clear wage-slashing tactic, the Red Cross is looking to add to its surplus by deskilling its workforce. Highly skilled Blood Service workers on grades 3, 4 and 5 can earn as much as $101,000 a year. The new positions will be classified as grades 1 or 2 laboratory and processing workers. These workers will earn as much as $55,000 less than those they are replacing.
This announcement is the latest example of a trend emerging across the health care sector, where stories of skilled worker redundancies are stacking up.
At the smaller end of the scale is Melbourne’s St Vincent’s Hospital, where three specialist counsellors were recently forcibly made redundant in a bid to save costs. At the other end is Melbourne Health’s announcement that it plans to save $8 million by making up to 100 workers redundant.
Unless they fight, Red Cross Blood Service workers are facing a demoralising choice: take a package or compete with each other and new applicants for one of the 50 new lower paid jobs. A testing but courageous move would be to stand together and fight hard to retain their current conditions within the new organisational framework.
If these workers are prepared to struggle collectively, with the unions backing them, perhaps they can show the Red Cross a bit about the meaning of its own slogan – “the power of humanity”.

Disability sector bosses ask Fair Work to gut award

Health workers ‘reform’ already under way

Red Cross cuts skilled workforce

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us