The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU NSW) is writing
on behalf its members employed as Professional Staff in Universities. The union
is particularly concerned of the economic impact that travel restrictions
resulting from the COVID-19 epidemic is having on universities.
The Government’s Economic
Response to the Coronavirus released today recognised the significant effect
that COVID-19 is having on the education sector. Despite this, there was no
additional funding announced for the university sector. The CPSU NSW finds this
omission to be extremely short-sighted, and seeks that the Federal Government
urgently steps in to provide adequate additional funding to Universities
experiencing, or likely to experience significant losses in revenue because of
COVID-19.
Leading economists, international rating agencies and the
industry’s peak commercial body, Universities Australia, have all raised the
potential vulnerability the sector faces in any prolonged restriction on
international student travel in response to the rapid spread of coronavirus,
particularly in China.
Standard & Poors estimate Australian universities stand
to forfeit around $3.1 billion in lost revenue. For example, the University of
Sydney recently announced a $200 million financial short fall as a result of
the travel restrictions.
Education is our third largest export. For decades
Governments have pushed public universities to build business models based on
expanding their international fee paying student numbers to supplement cuts in
public funding.
Universities have been turned into businesses and in doing
so exposed them to market vulnerability. Many are now either highly dependent
on revenue from international students, or cash-strapped to the extent they
can’t easily sustain a further decline in income. They have become among the
most critical employers in our regions and generate enormous economic activity
in other parts of the economy.
For these reasons the CPSU NSW seeks that the Federal
Government urgently provides additional funding to the University sector.
The PSA/CPSU NSW has been negotiating a range of benefits for workers affected by the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The following describes conditions for people working in different sectors.
NSW public sector and state-owned corporations
The NSW Government has released a Premier’s Circularthat establishes a number of key provisions to help manage the current COVID-19 pandemic at work.
The circular includes the following provisions:
Paid special leave of up to 20 days for people who need to be excluded from workplace/placed in quarantine
Paid special leave of up to 20 days for people with caring responsibilities or who have transport disruptions (without needing to exhaust other forms of leave first)
Paid special leave if the workplace is closed
For people who are sick – they apply for sick leave as usual, if they exhaust sick leave they can apply for special leave
Provision to work flexibly/remotely/at other locations where at all possible.
We are still attempting to resolve issues regarding casual workers, who are placed in a difficult position if required to work but unwell, and the union is particularly concerned with “frontline casual workers” who may not be able to work from home.
This circular should set the minimum standard for workers in the federal system, as described below.
University sector
The university sector has been particularly affected by the impact COVID-19 virus, with both revenue being affected and campuses closed. On 11 March 2019 both the Gold Coast and Lismore campuses of Southern Cross University closed due to COVID-19 concerns. The CPSU NSW was able to gain confirmation from the university that that all staff scheduled to work during this closure, including casuals, are to be paid for their rostered hours. Macquarie University has also agreed to pay casuals in the event of a close down. CPSU NSW officials have been consulting with other university administration and have been establishing supportive framework for university workers during this pandemic including for casual employees. The union’s industrial representatives will continue to consult with universities to maintain safety and support workers’ conditions.
TAFE NSW
The above Premier’s Circular also applies to TAFE NSW. The CPSU NSW will continue to consult with TAFE NSW to ensure the health and safety of our members.
Disability, utilities, private prisons and other federal system employees
These sectors are not immune from COVID-19 and are considered significant at- risk industries due to the nature of their clients and the essential services they deliver. The above circular should form the standard for supporting workers’ safety and industrial conditions via consultations that the union has commenced with your employer.
Work health and safety
As a declared pandemic, this is a health and safety issue for many workers. The PSA/CPSU NSW is meeting with your employer regularly to consult on establishing workplace safety controls that will assist you manage pandemic influenza safety at work. We will continue to do this and workers are encouraged to do this locally with management through the mechanisms available under the Work Health and Safety Act. Prevention is of course preferable, so reducing or eliminating close contact with public (and co-workers) is a recommended mechanism, as well as systematic cleaning of surfaces.
The World Health Organisation has also published advice on how to get your workplace ready for COVID-19.
It includes tips such as:
Making sure workplaces are CLEAN AND HYGIENIC
Promoting regular, thorough HAND-WASHING by employees, contractors and customers
Promoting GOOD RESPIRATORY HYGIENE in the workplace
Advising people to CONSULT TRAVEL ADVISORIES before business trips
For places where COVID-19 is spreading in the community, asking people to STAY HOME FROM WORK if they have symptoms, even if they’re just a MILD COUGH, LOW-GRADE FEVER (37.3 degrees Celsius or more) or if they have taken medicines such as paracetamol, ibuprofen or aspirin, because these can mask symptoms.
“Employers should start doing these things now, even if COVID-19 has not arrived in the communities where they operate,” the document says.
If you are concerned that workplace prevention, travel warnings and isolation measures are not being adhered to please contact your employer. In the event that your employer does not act, contact your union to progress.
During times such as these, it is important to maintain respectful relations with colleagues. Please keep informed about the pandemic’s developments and please do not panic. Our members in the Ministry of Health are informed and competent and are working to keep NSW safe and healthy.
Your union will continue to support members through this pandemic. If you are aware of colleagues are not yet members ask them to JOIN.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU NSW) has called on the Federal Government to provide urgent financial assistance to universities affected by any downturn in international student numbers.
Leading economists, international rating agencies and the industry’s peak commercial body, Universities Australia, have all raised the potential vulnerability the sector faces in any prolonged restriction on international student travel in response to the rapid spread of coronavirus in China.
Standard & Poors estimate Australian universities stand to forfeit around $3.1 billion in revenue
CPSU NSW Assistant Branch Secretary, Troy Wright said “education is now our third largest export”.
“For decades Governments have pushed our public universities to build business models based on expanding their international fee paying student numbers to supplement cuts in public funding,” he said. “We’ve turned our public universities into businesses and in doing so exposed them to market vulnerability.
“Many of our universities are now either highly dependent on revenue from international students, or cash-strapped to the extent they can’t easily sustain a further decline in income.
“Universities have become among the most critical employers in our regions and generate enormous economic activity in other parts of the economy.
“The Prime Minister must step-in and ensure adequate additional funding is available to universities experiencing, or likely to experience significant losses in revenues.”
Thane Pearce CPSU NSW Industrial Officer tpearce@psa.asn.au Australian Catholic University, Charles Sturt University, UTS, Western Sydney University, University of New England
Lisa Nelson CPSU NSW Industrial Officer lnelson@psa.asn.au University of Sydney, Universities Admissions Centre, Macquarie University, Newcastle University, University of NSW, University of Wollongong
Kirra Jackson CPSU NSW Organiser kjackson@psa.asn.au Universities Admissions Centre, Macquarie University, University of NSW, Western Sydney University
Chris Bird CPSU NSW Organiser cbird@psa.asn.au University of Sydney, UTS
The most unionised occupation is teaching, the next most unionised is health care.
ShutterstockAnthony Forsyth, RMIT University
What have Scott Morrison and and Attorney General Christian Porter got in mind for unions?
The answer seems to be more of the same, more use of coercive power to make it harder for unions to fulfil their democratic functions of protecting workers and fighting inequality.
The newly-reintroduced Ensuring Integrity Bill was rejected in 2017, but the government thinks it’s got a better chance now, with the support of at least four of the six senate crossbenchers.
In part that’s because of the behaviour of John Setka, head of the Victorian branch of the Construction Forestry Maritime Mining Energy Union who has been convicted of using a carriage service to harass a woman.
Read more:
View from The Hill: Now the senators are taking on John Setka
The Bill does not actually address Setka or his conduct, but the Government is using that negative impression to justify these new laws.
And it’s because of words like these, used by Justice Dyson Heydon, the royal commissioner tasked with examining trade union governance and corruption by the Abbott government:
it is clear that in many parts of the world constituted by Australian trade union officials, there is room for louts, thugs, bullies, thieves, perjurers, those who threaten violence, errant fiduciaries and organisers of boycotts
It’s also what the government wants people to believe about trade unions; that they are ugly, violent, law-breaking and self-interested.
In truth the most unionised occupation is teaching, the next most unionised is health care, and the third is protective services.
Why make it harder for teachers and nurses?
My research finds that there was a problem with union corruption the best part of a decade ago, most starkly apparent in the Health Services Union scandal, but for the most part unions have cleaned up their act.
I told the Senate inquiry into the Ensuring Integrity Bill that a proportionate response to the Royal Commission’s findings was warranted.
It included legislation imposing higher standards of financial management accountability on union officers, higher penalties for serious breaches of the Registered Organisations Act, criminal penalties for “corrupting benefits” and requirements for disclosure of benefits passing to a union under an enterprise agreement, clearer governance standards for separate entities and union funds such as election funds, and a specialist regulator for registered organisations.
Read more:
Fall-out from Setka affair could give Coalition easier passage of union bill
Almost all of these measures have now been implemented. So what are we to make of the reheated Bill? It looks like an opportunistic attempt to take down unions.
Morrison needs an agenda
The government didn’t expect to be re-elected. Its business mates are demanding industrial relations reform. They want to shut down powerful unions like the Construction Forestry Mining Energy Union. The government tried to stop it merging with the Maritime Union to become the CFMMEU rather than the CFMEU, but the Bill didn’t get through parliament in time.
With that objective frustrated, business wants new weapons to take on unions.
Hence the provisions in the Bill enabling employers, the minister and the Registered Organisations Commission to seek the disqualification of union officials and the deregistration of unions; provisions that could prove very handy in an industrial dispute, adding to the already extensive range of weapons employers already have access to.
Read more:
Grattan on Friday: Morrison government solid on industrial relations reform but bootlicks One Nation on family law
The Bill massively over-reaches. The government claims it’s simply applying to unions the same regulatory standards that apply to corporations. But its application of the corporate model is highly selective.
So it’s one rule for unions
Schedule 1 would allow court-ordered disqualification to be sought against a union official on much wider grounds than those available for company directors.
An employer could seek to have an official removed because they have been involved in a technical breach of the protected industrial action rules under the Fair Work Act, but a union could not seek disqualification of a company director who had breached the same legislation by, for instance, presiding over the underpayment of workers.
Disqualification could also be sought because a union official had breached the proposed “fit and proper person” test.
There is no fit and proper test for company directors, although there is for people providing financial advice and running businesses including labour hire businesses in Victoria.
The purpose of the latter test is to impose barriers to entry on dodgy and exploitative managers. There is no equivalent justification for prefventing someone becoming a union official.
Read more:
Fall-out from Setka affair could give Coalition easier passage of union bill Schedule 2 proposes new grounds for deregistering unions that partly mirror some of the grounds for court-ordered wind-ups of companyies under the Corporations Act.
Another rule for employers
But the addition of new grounds relating to a union’s (or members’) non-compliance with a wide range of laws has no equivalent in the Corporations Act.
Among the proposed grounds is “obstructive industrial action” – unprotected action that hinders of interferes with the activities of an employer or a public service, or that has a substantial adverse effect on community safety, health or welfare. Only a single instance would be needed.
The target of Schedule 2 seems to be the CFMMEU. But Commissioner Heydon neither recommended deregistration of the CFMEU nor proposed any change to the deregistration provisions.
The government already has the ability to seek deregistration of the CFMMEU under the Registered Organisations Act. Some of its grounds, including repeated breaches of court orders, would be sufficient in my view.
Instead of testing the existing law, the government has chosen to seek much wider grounds for deregistration and to give more parties, including employers, access to the mechanism, creating a threat to all unions, not just the CFMMEU.
And confusion about what unions do
The Coalition and employers can’t seem to make up their minds about unions.
They present them as both:
a threat to the economy, with the merged CFMMEU threatening one part of the economy, and the proposed amalgamation of the National Union of Workers and United Voice threatening another.
The Ensuring Integrity Bill tells us it’s this second view that’s predominant, notwithstanding the reality that most unions play a valuable role in protecting vulnerable workers from exploitation, challenging managerial power in the workplace, and enhancing our democracy. Anthony Forsyth, Professor of Workplace Law, RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
LabourStart has had the same logo for 21 years (see above), and now we think it may be time to freshen things up a bit.
For that reason we're launching a new logo competition.
This competition is open to everyone.
Here is how it is going to work:
Submitting your logos
First, some technical details:
Image size: Please submit a logo that is 400 pixels wide and 200 pixels high. The logo must include the text 'LabourStart' (like the current logo).
Format: We will accept the following formats only: GIF, JPG, and PNG.
In addition, the winner of the competition should be prepared to send us one high-resolution version of the logo that we can use on printed promotional materials such as banners and t-shirts.
Please note that in submitting your logo to LabourStart, you are giving us the full rights to use the image. This must be an image you created, and for which you own the rights.
How to submit:
Please submit your logo -- just one logo per person -- using WeTransfer.
Make sure to include your correct email address.
In the Message box there, include your full name and country.
The deadline to submit your logo is midnight GMT on 31 October 2019.
What happens next
The members of the LabourStart Executive will review all the submissions during the course of November.
Designers whose logos made the shortlist will be notified by email.
LabourStart will release the shortlist by the beginning of December, at which point a public vote will take place online.
The winner will be notified by 31 December 2019.
Spread the word!
Please share this widely. The more people submit logos, the better the designs on our shortlist will be.
The CPSU-NSW, your union, is investigating member’s experiences with flexible work. In order to do so, we have created this survey. It will only take around 5 minutes and will provide valuable information that will help us best support you, and ensure that we are working on workplace issues that you care about.
All information collected will be strictly confidential. If you have any questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to reach out to your HERC delegates:
If your university isn’t on this list please feel free to contact kjackson@psa.asn.au.
If you know of any people that are members of the CPSUNSW please ask them to fill out this survey. If you know of anyone that isn’t a member of the CPSUNSW but wants a say, please ask them to sign up and we will get in contact with them. At the moment, this survey is only for members of the CPSUNSW.
We appreciate your time in reading this bulletin and filling out the survey. If you would like to get more involved please don’t hesitate to reach out to your local delegate, or email Kirra kjackson@psa.asn.au or Chris cbird@psa.asn.au, the two organisers for universities.
Many Australians are shocked by celebrity chef George Calombaris being caught for underpaying employees A$7.8 million. It didn’t help, of course, that the television personality was also reported to be seeking a huge pay rise for appearing in the television program MasterChef Australia.
But what should not be a surprise is the prevalence in Australia of wage theft – typically underpaying award rates and entitlements such as overtime, superannuation and penalty rates.
Calombaris is not alone. In recent years there have equally large cases of wage theft involving household brand names such as Caltex, 7-Eleven, Pizza Hut and Domino’s Pizza.
The Australian Taxation Office estimated that in 2014-2015 Australian workers had been short-changed A$2.5 billion on superannuation payments alone .
Workplace audits by the federal Fair Work Ombudsman over the past decade suggest wage theft is rising. Most vulnerable are the young, the low-skilled and temporary migrants.
Calombaris has had a hard time denying he knew what happened in his companies. Bigger brands have gotten away with minimising costs through supply-chain arrangements where there’s exploitation somewhere along the line. It’s the very same problem that enables modern slavery to flourish around the world. These companies can deny responsibility because they have no direct legal obligations.
The problem isn’t just structural. It is also cultural.
Wage theft seems to have become accepted as a fact of life, maybe even a necessity, in certain sectors and workplaces. As a result, employers have developed a sense of impunity, while workers have become resigned to underpayment as unavoidable.
More than three-quarters of international students and backpackers, for example, know they’re being underpaid but accept it because they believe it’s standard treatment for anyone on their type of visa.
Cultural acceptance translates into weak enforcement rules. Wage theft is not considered a criminal offence, in the same way as stealing money from a company. Those caught face low penalties. Calombaris, for example, has to pay his employees what they are owed, but his penalty is limited to a $200,000 “contrition payment”).
Finally, a reform agenda
In this context – practices and attitudes making wage theft rampant – the only positive thing about Calombaris’ case is that, combined with other high profile cases, it has triggered enough outrage to make politicians get serious about reform.
The federal government has indicated it will propose new laws to make wage theft a criminal offence, punishable with prison time.
Along with tougher laws, more resources for enforcement are also needed.
Other reforms could help too. Supply chain certification, similar to the schemes used to guarantee fairtrade coffee or sustainably caught fish, are an example. The Fairwork Ombudsman has partnered with business and unions to create a pilot certification scheme for the cleaning industry.
Modern slavery legislation now requires large companies to report on their efforts to keep their supply chains slave-free. Acceptance of such reporting obligations could pave the way for the expectation that companies more attention to stamping out all forms of worker exploitation.
Community responsibility
There is one other notable point to make about the Calombaris case. It is about our own responsibility.
As a community we have collectively accepted wage theft for too long.
Collectively we seem to have higher tolerance for the mistreatment of workers at the fringes of the labour market – such as migrants, young workers and the low-skilled.
It is time to take stock. Work will change drastically in coming decades. More of us face the prospect of being among the vulnerable, with the jobs we do now being taken over by AI and automation.
Technology has also facilitated “uberisation” and the growth of the gig economy, in which companies minimise their obligations by denying workers are employees.
Considering the breadth of change to come, we need more than ever to reflect on what we accept and enable.
