fbpx

Protected Action Defeat Proves Danger of Fair Work System

Staff at TasWater have recently voted on proposed Enterprise Agreements – with all 4 EAs overwhelmingly rejected by staff after an insulting and disrespectful offer from management that ignored most of members’ log of claims.  Employees have spoken and the strong majority have said that this offer is an insult and TasWater management needs to go back to the drawing board, bargain with union members in good faith and improve the offer.   

  • 74.88% Voted against the Southern Agreement 
  • 82.79% Voted against the Northwestern Agreement 
  • 73.92% Voted against the Senior Agreement  
  • 86.8% Voted against the Northern Agreement 

Despite this overwhelming result – at the close of voting on the CPSU Protected Action ballot a majority of votes had not been cast, so the ballot was lost.   

Since TasWater is a Government Business – it operates under the Commonwealth Fair Work Act instead of our stronger Tasmanian Industrial Relations Act. Under Fair Work rules it didn’t matter that a majority that voted supported the action, we needed a majority of those eligible to vote. 

Right now, staff at TasTAFE are being threatened with being forcibly removed from the State Service into Fair Work by the Gutwein Government as they attempt to privatise our public vocational education provider. Fair Work is a system stacked against workers – where you lose out on the benefit of having thousands of State Service members by your side and bargaining collectively.  

The Gutwein Government has pulled out its best weasel words – saying draft legislation put out for consultation this week will leave, “no current employees worse off.” We know this means they plan to make it easier to erode the hard-fought pay and conditions for TasTAFE in the future. But we can still stop this. By joining our Keep it Ours campaign, you can help us pressure the Legislative Council to oppose privatising TasTAFE. 

We need you to pledge your support for our campaign to put a halt to any and all privatisation in our state. We built our state with public services – let’s keep it ours!

Share this post!

More like this