The saga continues in the State Service with no one willing to address the current public sector bargaining and delivering an offer on your wages and conditions that will help to fix the issues you’re all facing.
You would have received an email from the Head of the State Service (HoSS) at the start of the week, advising that you’re to remain in caretaker mode. A completely unusual situation when the Governor of the state has sworn in the Premier and his cabinet.
Further, if you were to follow the link in the email and review the document explaining ‘caretaker mode’, it clearly outlines that it is to run from the dissolution of the government and to end when the new government is sworn in.
But instead, we have a HoSS that would rather see the government’s bureaucracy continue on their vacation from responsibility (caretaker mode) when it is expected that they would be returning to business as usual and dealing with their Ministers.
The reality is that the HoSS is buying themselves and the government time so that they can delay any real decisions and further put pressure on you by not negotiating your Awards and Agreements in good faith.
We went to public sector bargaining yesterday, and despite delaying the meeting for 2 weeks due to the election results, they were completely under prepared and not wanting to have any real discussion about the claims you’ve put forward.
They put forward the view that effectively half of your claims should not be discussed at all (saying that they weren’t rejecting them, but they simply didn’t want to negotiate them in this forum) and that they had put together a list for us to discuss in 3 weeks’ time.
We didn’t accept this and argued about the whole debacle of a process that they’re heading on – they have effectively delayed negotiations for 3 months since we sat down at the table and forced them to discuss the list then and there.
The simple fact is that no one from the government is taking your negotiations seriously. I have still not received a response to the letter that I sent to the Premier last Friday, you still don’t have a wage offer and all of your conditions matters are sitting unanswered.
The message from the government is loud and clear to us – the public sector is going to have to stand up and take matters into its own hands to force everyone to put them as a priority!
We’ll keep you in the loop over the next few weeks as we hold delegate meetings, as well as upcoming membership meetings across the state.
Keep your eyes out for our updates.