Tweed Shire is the most hazardous workplace for depa members in NSW

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Published: Wednesday, 20 December 2017 13:32

Tweed Shire GM Troy Green

There won’t be any teasing buildup, listing nominees and identifying their inadequacies (although they do get a brief mention at the end of this) we are cutting to the chase here.  Tweed Shire wins the 2017 award for the Worst HR in Local Government by a margin so significant, no one else was in the race.

Tweed, and in particular the Building and Environmental Health Unit has the worst culture of workforce bullying depa has seen in the last three decades.  And, to make matters worse, an unacceptably slow and almost begrudging acceptance by the GM and others that something needed to be done.

This all began for our members (and those were not members of ours and in the admin staff) in 2015 with the appointment of a new Manager Building and Environmental Unit.  But it was not until February this year got a we started to get the first phone calls from members wanting to speak confidentially, fearing our involvement (one member was told by the manager that if he was going to get advice from the union, he needed to tell the manager first!), cowed, anxious and having had enough.  For some members, so distressed and anxious were they about retribution, that conversations were difficult and many couldn’t be finished.

There is a limit, given our commitment to protect the health and wellbeing of our members, to how many confidential calls we can manage before we act.  We could handle one, maybe two, but beyond that something clearly needed to be done.
 
There had been changes to the structure without advice to depa contrary to their obligations under the Award, one employee (not a member of ours) had been moved (largely against her wishes professionally but satisfying a desire to get away from the manager), work was redistributed to people already overworked, all against a background of low morale and the new manager’s unusual communication and management style.
 
Already by this stage a number of employees had sought advice and assistance from the manager HR, the director and even the GM.  The Council has claimed that they had no formal claims or allegations to investigate but just as we can’t ignore confidential approaches and at some stage need to do something, neither should the Council ignore them.
 
They could ignore one, or two, but by our counting there were more than 11 people who had approached the triumvirate of GM, director and manager HR for help, either individually or collectively - and while the Council argued that they did do some things, they continued to argue they couldn’t do anything because nothing was formal.  They were aware of the problem, they failed to fix it.

One of our members brought the matter to a head with allegations of bullying and harassment.  We became involved and out of that involvement the Council agreed to have a review of the change process, but only in relation to the Environmental Health section of the Unit.
 
Our member who provided the impetus for this review has been on sick leave on and off since April and on workers' compensation continuously since May - with the Council and their insurer StateCover in June accepting that they had been injured in the workplace and by the manager.  This was to be our first member sufficiently damaged the have a workers’ compensation claim accepted.

And the phone calls from members kept coming, confidentially of course and on 31 May, just before the external consultant was to conduct the review I took the unusual step of emailing all members asking if they were okay and whether they wanted us to do something.  The protection of confidentiality confirmed that they did.  And didn’t they unload on what had been an horrific time for them going back over the two years.  They tried to manage it and cope, but received no assistance from the Council, and could cope no longer...

The next day the GM set the tone for how they would respond to our concerns in a letter of response berating depa for communicating with members on the eve of the Independent review in a way which “has the potential to compromise the integrity and independence of the review process and as such directly or indirectly negatively impact the health and well-being of Council staff.”

We live with the continuing regret that we didn’t file a dispute then, to get the whole thing into the IRC in an open and public way and have the IRC assist the management of the issue. We may have been able to better protect our injured members.

Interestingly the GM committed to address the problem and asserted that their commitment “is practically demonstrated by the time, money and resources committed to the review process currently underway.”  The GM can now show us how much that commitment has cost, both in time, money and resources.  Come on Troy, what have you spent so far?

It then emerged that the review was not going to interview those employees in the Building section, nor the admin staff, nor transferred staff, nor anyone who had left the organisation unhappy about the change in managerial style.  We were able to have a Council agree to broaden the review to cover the building staff and the admin staff but not transferred staff or those who had fled the organisation.  Why would the Council want the consultant to talk to them when they already knew what the consultant would find?

It was clear that management at the Council, particularly the GM, the Director and the HR Manager, were keen to remain part of the problem rather than part of the solution and by this stage we knew at least seven people had made complaints to the triumvirate.  On 18 July we wrote to the GM under the heading “the emerging evidence of the hazards of working at Tweed” imposing deadlines to be provided with the relevant reports into the injured worker and the conclusions of the review and we met at Murwillumbah on 27 July - from 11 to 3:30, largely without lunch punctuated by arguments about having access to documents for fear that we would misuse them.

The GM agreed to take some immediate steps to reduce the hazards in the workplace while a consultant tried to rebuild workplace relationships, mentor and help the manager work on his empathy and self-awareness, conduct workshops for all staff to assist them develop a resilience and assertiveness to allow them to tell the manager when his behaviour was unacceptable or hurtful, so they could become part of the therapy.  Lovely.

The GM agreed that the manager would be directed not to have one-on-one meetings, nor meetings with staff in his office with the door closed and to discourage the manager from getting others to interrogate employees about what they were saying in what the manager thought looked like suspicious circumstances.  Please, how was this allowed to develop?  These were intended to be temporary arrangements, but they continue six months later...

And it hasn’t got any better.  We now have a second member off work on workers' compensation with the Council and StateCover also acknowledging that the same manager was responsible for the injury.  Significantly, the injury occurred during the mentoring,  during the significant hands-on assistance provided by the consultant to the manager and support to employees both through the EAP and, for at least four of our members, seeking advice and assistance from the external consultant as well.  A proper costing of this exercise will reveal that it has cost the Council a fortune.

The Council is lucky that it’s only two of our members on workers' compensation.  One of those is unlikely to return at all but the other has high hopes to return to safe work and a hazard-free workplace. One member preferred to remain at the Council but to restructure to avoid having to report to the manager and this has provided temporary respite, and a fourth yesterday said to me that the manager now rarely comes out of his office and employees can go to the lunchroom without being scared.  That’s all good news, of course, but how much of a solution is locking the manager up?

This is the most hazardous workplace for our members in New South Wales, the GM is responsible for allowing it to develop, failing to manage it and failing to remove the problem.  It is something that he knew about from late 2015.  We have 509 emails in our Tweed file since March and we don’t keep them all.

And while the GM was responsible for allowing it, the director and the HR manager were complicit by defending their inaction because they didn’t have a formal complaint, and being part of the problem.

Two accepted workers' compensation claims, one member temporarily safe by restructuring the job to remove one-on-one contact and others, thinking things are okay because the temporary rules about no one-on-one meetings, no closed-door meetings continue six months later and look like continuing well into 2019.  Clearly there was a simpler solution? 

What about the others?

Campbelltown lumbers on with the glacier-like pace of their restructure and replacement of experienced employees lost more than a year ago, but have redeemed themselves a bit and don’t get nominated by doing the right thing for a member mum returning to work on a two-day week part-time basis; Murray River has been exposed for stealing hours from workers by making them work 36 hours a week instead of 35 and then been largely uncooperative about trying to resolve it, and it’s a problem that goes back for many years at the former Murray Shire; and Sydney City, which simply can’t help itself and continues to present as a Council with an admirable and progressive approach to planning, transport, climate change and making Sydney a more attractive city but with employment conditions and an Award that sits more appropriately in the 1960s and a hostility to the significant and progressive changes in the State Award over the last 10 or 20 years.
 
But really, none of these places injure their employees like Tweed does.

depaNews HR awards will be out Wednesday or Thursday...

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Published: Monday, 18 December 2017 13:29

Despite what looks unnervingly like an outbreak of good HR in 2017, we still have some nominations and we will have a clear winner.

depa elections next year

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Published: Monday, 18 December 2017 13:29

Early in 2018 will see the two-year election cycle for the positions of President, two Vice Presidents, and six members of the Committee of Management.  This will also coincide with the four-year cycle for the position of Secretary.

Financial members can expect to receive notice from the State Electoral Office in February or March.

There is currently a vacancy on the Committee of Management and while all the other members of the Committee will be re-contesting their positions, we are looking for one more member interested in bringing their experience, usually as our delegate or representative on the Consultative Committee, onto the Committee of Management.  But the election allows anyone to stand, experienced or otherwise. It’s the joy of the democratic process, after all.

Ordinarily we find candidates are people who have already been active in depa and want to become more active.

Think about it over the break.  If you’d like to know more about it, give me a ring.

Code of Conduct

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Published: Monday, 18 December 2017 13:28

Hope you got your submissions in.  We did and here it is if you are interested.

As a reminder, because this is the wrong time of the year to find yourself in trouble, beware of the current 6.7(i) because there are over-excited people out there arguing that the prohibition of “staff meeting with applicants or objectors alone AND outside office hours to discuss applications or proposals” doesn’t only apply to dealing with formal application or objections as part of your job.  It means you can’t give advice to your mum, or your mate, at home and in your own time.

LGNSW CEO Donna Rygate proudly launches their game changer

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Published: Monday, 18 December 2017 13:28

Well, we don’t like it, LGEA doesn’t like it, the USU has said that they won’t accept anything which is a breach of the Award and will dispute breaches at each Council, but LGNSW will roll out their Capability Framework in 2018 regardless. They say it suits their purposes and we all say it’s a big steaming pile of it.

When our dispute was first listed before Chief Commissioner Kite in the IRC on 10 October 2017 LGNSW agreed in the course of conciliation to publishing something on their website discouraging councils from proceeding to implement the framework until they had prepared guides and issuing cautionary advice that the framework does not alter Award obligations to evaluate positions according to the Award or do a variety of other things required by the salary system.
 
Well, in their usual weasel words way, they said “not recommended” rather than “discouraged”, but that’s about as good as it gets with zealots like that, lining up for their Kool-Aid*.
 
Since then, LGNSW has produced four Guides, to which we provided a comprehensive response in a long, long letter dated 11 December identifying those parts of the Award in addition to the cautionary notes about clause 7 Salary Systems and critiquing the four individual Guides.  LGNSW adopted a number of our suggestions but, as far as we were concerned, not enough.  However, they were prepared to acknowledge that they had understated the award clauses to which this framework thing would relate, and may potentially affect, and it’s now agreed that the following clauses will be incorporated:

Clause 2 Statement of Intent
Clause 5 Skill Descriptors
Clause 7 Salary System
Clause 8 Use of Skills
Clause 9 Performance evaluation and reward
Clause 31 Training and Development
Clause 39 Workplace Change, and
clause 40 Termination of Employment and Redeployment due to Redundancy.
 
It remains a deeply flawed document without the precautions to protect employees from zealous HR or management acolytes.  Example, it’s all well and good to caution these guileless innocents that there are two particular things that they are obliged to do under clause 7 Salary Systems but that clause obliges councils to do 12 things.  What happens to the other ten?

Returning to the Commission on 15 December, LGNSW acknowledged that they had no proposed launch date, they hadn’t yet arranged training and information sessions but they would be going hard with it in 2018. In its current form it suits their purposes.

Whether or not councils will adopt this framework remains to be seen. LGNSW has coyly developed a step-by-step process that at no stage requires anyone to understand what it is, or what it isn’t, or where the benefits are, or how astonishingly staff-intensive and ludicrously expensive it will be to roll out a process which, in many ways, is simply saying what the industry does now, but in a different language. This will cost those councils duped by the zealots calling them to join them in the line waiting for their Kool-Aid*, a fortune.

LGNSW is trying to suck up to the NSW Government by adopting a strategy introduced in the State public sector after 50 years of inaction.  This compares unfavourably to what we have done in local government - the dramatic reform initiatives developed over decades of cooperation with the local government unions and now enshrined for the last quarter of a century in the Local Government State Award.
 
And while it might have been boasted as a game changer by the current CEO, whether or not the newly elected LGNSW Board thinks this profligate waste of local government’s precious resources and money is worthwhile, remains to be seen.
 
We will be supplying information to our representatives on consultative committees to allow them to fully understand our concerns about the Award and its obligations on councils and where those obligations are at risk.  But make no mistake, this is a very costly exercise where the best LGNSW can say is that there are “possible” benefits.
 
*"Drinking the Kool-Aid" is an idiom commonly used in the United States that refers to any person or group who goes along with a doomed or dangerous idea because of peer pressure. The phrase often carries a negative connotation when applied to an individual or group. It can also be used ironically or humorously to refer to accepting an idea or changing a preference due to popularity, peer pressure, or persuasion. In recent years it has evolved further to mean extreme dedication to a cause or purpose, so extreme that one would "Drink the Kool-Aid" and die for the cause.

LGS agrees it’s their responsibility, and they will fix it

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Published: Thursday, 23 November 2017 15:16

Last month we reported on our industrial dispute filed with Local Government NSW representing councils over the apparent underpayment of superannuation by a significant number of councils. This affected some of the 4500 employees remaining in the two closed defined benefit schemes managed by LGS - the Retirement Scheme and the Defined Benefits Scheme.

We’d had two unsatisfying meetings with LGS and LGNSW before the dispute came on in the Commission. For both LGS and LGNSW, this was all about someone else’s responsibility. LGS claimed it was the councils or the individual employees and LGNSW claimed it was LGS or the employees.

With a new CEO as a replacement for the irreplaceable and much-loved Peter Lambert, David Smith found himself between a rock and a hard place. The advice he was getting was coming from those sections of the organisation where we could reasonably expect would have been ensuring compliance with the rules over the years. Uh oh …

A direction from Chief Commissioner Kite to depa as the notifier to invite the “proper officer” of LGS to attend and assist the Commission on the next occasion led to a couple of lawyers and the LGS CEO with a couple of others attending the Commission on 3 November. But it wasn’t the bad experience that it could have been.

On 1 November the LGS Board had met and in an email to the parties the CEO advised it had resolved to direct the CEO to do two things:

• “to undertake an investigation into the allegations of non-compliance” as detailed in the (depa dispute) before the IRC “and providing the investigation substantiates non-compliance, as the LGS CEO to determine whether any LGS members in either the Retirement Fund all the Defined Benefit scheme had been adversely impacted.
• To seek appropriate external advice to establish a reasonable approach to determine and quantify the extent of any financial impact on LGS members for me to develop an appropriate remediation plan for Board approval to be applied to correct any non-compliance and make recommendations to the LGS Trustee Board including any suggested amendments to the Trust Deed or LGS policies and procedures, with a view to ensuring all employers are calculating superable salary correctly.”

Clearly the Three Wise Monkeys strategy presented to LGNSW and the unions in the previous meetings had been abandoned. And a good thing too.

CEO David Smith had also written to the Chief Commissioner accepting this responsibility and committing to both investigating and resolving any adverse effect on members of the fund. Here is his letter.

On that basis the Chief Commissioner was happy to adjourn our dispute until 30 January for a report back. LGS is putting on an additional resource to properly review and examine compliance with 1.2 and 1.3 and the Fund will also report to depa, the other unions in support and LGNSW about progress prior to Xmas.

Yesterday the LGS wrote to all councils as the next step in this process and you can see that letter here.

We’ve smashed through the wall and the Board has the staff doing what they should have been doing all along. Well done to the Board and the new CEO David Smith.

(And I’d like to thank those 150 or so members who responded and provided an individual authority for depa to act to obtain information that may be said by either the Fund or their Council to be confidential, to the extent necessary to resolve this dispute. We probably won’t need them now, but better to be sure than sorry.)

We still don’t know what this thing is

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Published: Thursday, 23 November 2017 15:16

When our industrial dispute about LGNSW’s purported Local Government Capability Framework (sic) was listed before Chief Commissioner Kite on 10 October, the Chief Commissioner required the parties to do two things.

The first (done within 24 hours or so and with a firm suggestion that LGNSW consult with the unions to find, as far as possible, an agreed form of words) was for LGNSW to put some information on their website as soon as possible warning the zealots off using the Capability Framework (sic) until the relevant development tools and guides had been prepared.

Second, that there be a focus on developing tools and guides for the appropriate use of the document for those who choose to use it. This was a process anticipating the involvement of the unions so that we do understand what it is and what isn’t so that when it is out there infecting the industry, we have some idea of what it’s for and what it shouldn’t be for.

We meet again next week and while we return to the IRC on 30 November LGNSW has still not provided any draft of tools and guidelines to discuss when we do meet.

Had a look at the Draft Code of Conduct yet?

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Published: Thursday, 23 November 2017 15:16

The Office of Local Government has prepared a Draft of a proposed new Model Code of Conduct. Remembering that it will become mandatory, so it’s worth a look. Here is a link.

There are significant additions in areas of harassment, discrimination and bullying and proposed 3.9 provides a definition of “bullying behaviour” as “any behaviour in which a person or a group of people repeatedly behaves unreasonably towards another Council official or a group of Council officials and the behaviour creates a risk to health and safety.”

Ooooooo, there is one Council in particular for whom that will be a significant risk. We’ve been dealing with an oppressive and bullying culture now for almost 9 months. Bit by bit the Council throws significant money at treating the unacceptable personal behaviour but also requires employees working under that person to be part of the treatment. Employees have been provided with training and workshops to learn communication skills and assertiveness sufficient to remind the bloke when he is distressing them or employees are in tears in front of him, it’s not appropriate. We can think of a better strategy.

We will be putting in a submission to OLG on the Draft Model Code before the closure date. Obviously we are interested in things like the protection in 5.5 that “the political views of a Councillor do not constitute a private interest for the purposes of clause 5.2” but for staff, the current provision at 7.4 (e) requires staff to “ensure that any participation in political activities outside the service of the Council does not conflict with the performance of their official duties” is intended to continue.

A better protection for the councillors by the look of it, and more restrictions on staff.

And look out for this...

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Published: Thursday, 23 November 2017 15:16

Members need to be aware of the current provision in the Code of Conduct known as the Wollongong provision when it was introduced. It’s found at the section titled “Inappropriate interactions” and prevents at 7.5(i)“Council staff meeting with applicants or objectors alone AND outside office hours to discuss applications or proposals.”

This was entirely appropriate when it went into the Model Code because the ICAC had revealed Council staff working away from the office and outside hours. Everyone assumed it prevented Council staff not meeting with developers outside hours and off the premises.

But we are aware of at least one Council which has taken the view that this, in its broadest interpretation, prevents employees of the Council when they are not working (that is, out of hours or on weekends) giving advice or assistance to friends and family in any dealing with the Council.

And when we checked this interpretation with the Office of Local Government, they agreed that in a broad sense that kind of activity could be affected. WTF?

Beware of this risk. Everyone needs to check whether their Council reads this provision as broadly as this before you help your Mum get an application together.

We will deal with the unreasonably broad interpretation of this provision in our submission.

Is that the time?

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Published: Thursday, 23 November 2017 15:16

Almost December, can that be right? As extraordinary as it might sound, 2017 has seen what can only be described as an outbreak of pretty good behaviour by HR. Maybe the mergers preoccupied people with developing PDs, recognising protections of staff while consolidating practices as best they can, or something’s gone in the drinking water, or my presentation as part of a panel at the LGNSW HR conference the end of 2016 was so beguiling, instructive and compelling that those HR people present were transformed and started to look after the interests and welfare of employees, instead of just seeing them as targets, or possible cost savings.

But something has happened - to the extent that sometimes we wonder what we’ll do in December when we need to announce our prestigious, authoritative and highly-anticipated Worst HR In Local Government Award - more popularly known as the Golden Turd.