Uh oh ...

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Published: Wednesday, 15 February 2017 14:48

NSW Deputy Premier and Premier yesterday

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced that the proposed local government mergers would only proceed in those areas she could comfortably drive to and get a decent coffee.  Reprising the Eva Gabor role from the 60s television series Green Acres (and making the role her own) the Premier announced that those amalgamations proposed outside the metropolitan area would now not proceed.  

While it’s easy to observe that the Premier should get out more  (because you’ve been able to get a decent coffee the other side of the Great Dividing Range for over a decade and places like Orange, have a thriving wine industry and great restaurants and cafes to boot - there is no Sydney-centricity in the depa office), the quarantining of regional areas and the bush generally sets up a very hypocritical approach to what should be an issue of public policy and the efficient delivery of local government services.  The Government will struggle to get over this.  

Clearly what’s good for the goose, is not necessarily good for the gander, in a Berejiklian/Barilaro New South Wales.

Smiling even more than the Premier was Deputy Premier John Barilaro.  Not only triumphantly delivering on a National Party policy of no forced mergers in the bush (but conveniently leaving alone the forced merger of his hometown Queanbeyan with Palerang) he was able to cleverly disguise his hammer lock on the Premier at the media conference in Parliament House yesterday.

If the bookies are right, the High Court will reject Woollahra’s application for leave to appeal later this month and Woollahra will have to merge with Randwick and Waverley, Hunter’s Hill will merge with Lane Cove and Ryde, Mosman with North Sydney and Willoughby and Hornsby and Ku-ring-gai.

You can see yesterday’s Media Release here and an up-to-date summary of those new councils that started in May 2016, the proposed Sydney mergers subject of the decision of the courts and those that won’t proceed from the NSW Government’s www.strongercouncils.nsw.gov.au

Next month ...

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Published: Wednesday, 15 February 2017 14:48

And more.

The sharks are circling

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Published: Monday, 23 January 2017 13:28

It’s hard to get motivated in January, isn’t it.  Hot, sunny, lazy days stretching out, holidays and no work, the beach, sultry nights, who doesn’t like summer?

But each year the media feels obliged to remind us that every time we go to the beach, there are sharks out there, hungry, circling and thinking how delicious we look.  But notwithstanding a bit of a surge in shark attacks locally in recent years, there is a better chance of being killed or injured driving to the beach, particularly if you’re driving on holidays.

There is also a better chance of being killed by coconuts falling on you, bee stings, pushbikes, your pet or someone else’s, cows, mosquitoes, champagne corks, or your wife or husband.  And whatever you do, keep away from hospitals – they are really dangerous places. Even DIY at home will get you before a shark will. 

They reckon the chance of being attacked by a shark across the globe is a one in 3,748,067 chance.  There is a much, much higher risk of some stupid daggy politician trying to kiss your baby.  So if you restrict your concept of shark to being the famous sea-bound predator, the chances of a shark ruining your life is pretty low.

But let’s talk about real sharks - rapacious, life-threatening, environment-ruining, craven, hungry, gluttonous, voracious but insatiable and threatening your quality of life, then summer not only brings with it shark stories, but the usual government commitment to fix planning.  Oh no, not again?  Because it’s in planning and development that the real sharks circle.

The announcement by Planning Minister Rob Stokes a couple of weeks ago to make amendments to the EP&A Act tried the three card trick - making housing easier to build, so there’s more of it and it’s more affordable.  Haven’t we seen that before?

But when it’s accompanied by rabid support from the white shoe brigade in the Property Council, the Urban Task Force and the UDIA, then we’d better look out.  They are three organisations never happy to accept the idea that planning instruments are primarily there to ensure that communities are protected and the public interest preserved when developers see a vacant site and get all hot and excited about building something monstrous on it to make themselves a motza, but always under the guise of doing everyone a favour.

We can’t do any better than providing links to two great articles that say it all so much better than we could.

First, the brilliant and incomparable Elizabeth Farrelly in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 January under the heading “Call me a cynic, Sydney’s planning changes just won’t deliver” - not only a beautifully written opinion piece but a constructive and thorough defence of the primacy of the public interest.  If only all opinion pieces and commentary was as good as this.

Second, and on a smaller and more accessible scale, is an article also from the Herald on 18 January by Jacob Saulwick - addressing the inconsistency of the Government’s commitment to better design while at the same time proposing two-storey terrace housing to be included in complying development - without any consideration to the other aspects of Victorian development that make terrace housing compatible and socially welcoming like lane ways and parkland and in a way that would remove any consideration from the community of design.

In January we’re allowed to draw upon the incomparable and compelling contributions of others and contract out our arguments. 

Who has the worst HR in local government in 2016?

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Published: Tuesday, 20 December 2016 09:09

Can it be true, that 2016 saw an outbreak of relatively good HR? In 2015 we had 10 councils nominated and the winner was Shoalhaven, and for the second time.  Looking back, it also included councils that still lumber on with continuing problems - Byron with their attitude to downgrading senior positions and finding they can’t attract staff (who’d have thought!), Cessnock with their sleight of hand on the development of an EA where this year they paid the penalty for the third year in the row for not having a salary system in operation and having made some very bad decisions about selecting a job evaluation system. Mercer!

Anyone who chooses Mercer as a job evaluation system in 2017 will get an automatic nomination.  Insidiously, it’s creeping across the local government landscape with a job evaluation system they steadfastly claim properly evaluates jobs but admit that when the skill descriptors went in the State Award in 1992 their system remained unchanged. And when the employers and the unions got together to develop the Local Government Job Evaluation System, which included agreed factors and weightings, Mercer’s system remained unchanged.

Cessnock has been lumbering on trying to introduce Mercer and hammer it down onto the local government landscape.  Chaos reigns.

We started awarding the infamous Golden Turd in 2010.  We did it because we’d seen some very ordinary HR and needed some mechanism to name and shame those who simply don’t get it, don’t try or don’t care.

We claim credit for moving on some HR managers, for getting the recalcitrant to focus on proper process, policy and protocols and changing attitudes of the reluctant to provide more focus on respecting employees and their needs in the workforce. There is also a certain degree of infamy too, because councils just don’t like having the worst HR in local government and they do usually try to do something about it. We’re helping lift the bar. No nominations for Shoalhaven this year.

2016 was different.  A reduction in the number of women meeting resistance on their return to work after babies and, let’s acknowledge some good work from Parramatta City HR which dragged a Neanderthal into the 21st century  and made him agree to suitable arrangements that should never have been rejected in the capricious and contemptuous way he had. Maybe there was some relief too from those councils not facing mergers and for those merged councils, dealing with much, much bigger issues, maybe the mergers had produced better behaviour – but sadly an improvement not provided as a reporting requirement in the DPC performance criteria.

This year we have four nominations, and the nominees are:

Campbelltown City Council

Despite Campbelltown’s core values of Respect, Integrity, Optimism, Trust and Team Work there has been little respect and trust shown to staff but significant optimism shown by staff who continue to hope for the best.  It’s one thing to acknowledge “trust, it takes years to build...  and seconds to lose” but there’s not much trust building going on there at the moment and we’ve had a couple of experiences late this year where the idea that they do anything to honour the behaviour of “Respect, you don’t get respect because you want it, you get respect because you earn it” seems only like gross hypocrisy.  More honoured in the breach than the observance, really.

Campbelltown is a growing area with historically benign leadership from general managers but some predictable gaps in processes and procedures.  In 2006 we filed a dispute with Campbelltown over a dawdling, indolent, unfocused and sub-professional investigation conducted by two of the directors at the time.  As part of the dispute the Council undertook to the IRC they would develop a policy but indolence and lack of focus meant that we needed to file a dispute again in 2014 (yes, eight years after they had undertaken to do it) to finally have the IRC assist us develop a policy on investigations which we thought at the time was probably the best in the industry.  One of the unfocused directors left for greener pastures but the other, Director of Community Services Lindy Dietz, is still there …

And just for fun, (because while this is a serious issue aimed at improving behaviour and standards in the industry, it is also meant to be fun) here is our letter to GM Paul Tosi in October 2006 telling him, quite clearly that we give up and will leave it to them.  But we left it to them to do what they do best, absolutely nothing, by making it clear that if any of our members were to be investigated in the absence of a decent policy, we would file a dispute and have the IRC manage it.

In 2014 we’d had enough, we filed a dispute and we fixed it.  

A succession of consultants’ reports into the planning and environment division showed that they were chronically understaffed.  Five planners down a consultant said five years ago, and given that both the work and the revenue has increased by 25% or so,  the recommended five additional planners would more likely to be seven planners needed now.  But the lack of leadership in that division and the incapacity of a succession of directors to be accessible and supportive of staff, and to do things to assist them, meant that those recommendations weren’t adopted, the positions weren’t advertised, the positions weren’t filled.  

The under-resourcing is reflected in comparison to similar councils in OLG Group 7, and next door at Camden, assessment planners have about half the allocation of DAs as their colleagues at Campbelltown. And it’s no better for the accredited certifiers.  

This is compounded by the Council’s notoriety for taking two years or more to fill vacancies.  Our more co-dependent members think it’s good that at least they are filling them eventually … it’s better than nothing. After all, they don’t get beaten up every day. Stockholm Syndrome, clearly.

The lack of respect for proper resourcing runs everyone ragged.  Overworked, ignored, disrespected.  A significant workplace safety issue ticking quietly away.

Hilariously, this year a member whose PD identified that he was responsible for the management of fire safety, but the Council refused to appoint people to do the work, proposed that if they weren’t going to resource their significant and high-risk liability, then they should remove that from his PD.  And they did!  An astonishing approach to risk management which says something really, really significant about the Division and its leadership.

Proper staffing will be a big issue for us in 2017.  You watch.

The longest-running restructure in the history of the world meant that we had a member acting in a managerial position as a temporary appointment for double the 12 months provided as an absolute limit in the Local Government Act and, when it came to filling the newly created manager positions when the finger was finally extracted under the new GM Lindy Dietz, any policies or protocols they had on recruitment processes, treatment of candidates and internal appeal mechanisms were studiously ignored.

How else do you explain applicants for positions being invited to interviews without notice of which positions they are being interviewed for, and then finding that the interview was for two positions?  A bit hard to prepare when you get an invitation without specifics.  Pretty disrespectful, really.  Then, interviews curtailed or expedited because a member of the panel couldn’t find the room and then had a more important meeting to attend and the time for the interview couldn’t be extended.  Then, having an employee act for two temporary appointment periods in 2009 and 2014, both of two years and on both occasions taking the view that while they were absolutely perfect while they acted in the job, they wouldn’t be appointed - all with no consciousness of how humiliating and logically inconsistent that decision was.  Then, how an employee appealing the fairness of a process of not being offered a position of manager gets an Outlook invitation to a meeting with the subject simply “Interview” and which turned out not to be an interview but an appeal on the fairness of the process under their protocol. No information at all provided – like it was an appeal, that a Director had been delegated the role by the GM, that the employee could bring a support person etc.  

All this and more establishes a general lack of respect for employees without rival in the industry.

And a lack of respect which has seen the Council lose two long-serving, loyal and well-regarded employees who had simply had enough.  And one of whom, leaving the organisation with a VR having refrained from accepting a grossly understaffed and under resourced managerial position as a poisoned chalice, but being moved out by the GM two months short of his 30 years of service.  Hard to top that, isn’t it.

So Campbelltown gets nominated and notice that they are in our sights for inadequate resourcing and disrespect of staff in 2017.

Lake Macquarie City Council

Laura Kendall and Steve Brown going to a lynchin’

LMCC is a Council which flies largely under the radar, notwithstanding some pretty unusual appointments in their HR area over the years.  It’s in its HR decision-making that it sometimes shows some lapses of judgement. Notwithstanding the wisdom and benign leadership of GM Brian Bell, they did find themselves in the Federal Court in a bullying and harassment case that ran for weeks and cost the Council an absolute bleeding fortune.

So in a way it wasn’t a surprise this year to find a member of ours involved in an investigation by Organisational Performance Manager (!)  Laura Kendall and the Manager Development Assessment and Compliance Steve Brown where both of them, right from the start, were absolutely convinced that he was guilty as charged.  A couple of people more likely to get excited about a lynchin’, would be hard to find.  

Ms Kendall, acknowledged in the Minister for Local Government’s Women in Local Government awards last year, pursued the investigation with the sole purpose of nailing someone - compromising procedural fairness by failing to do a number of things that would have allowed the employee to establish their innocence.  What the heck, the noose is ready to be thrown over the hangin’ tree and all they need to do is beat out a confession and find the innocent employee guilty.

Just about everything was a problem.  There was a flavour of intimidation right from the start - called to a meeting with Ms Kendall and Mr Brown at 2:30 in the afternoon on the Friday before the Anzac long weekend our bloke was told they were undertaking an investigation but details, although in the Council’s possession, were withheld.  At the next meeting, on his return to work after the long weekend on 27 April, four allegations were made.  The Council had documents relevant to three of them but refused to provide them.  

Notwithstanding their refusal to provide these documents, Ms Kendall pressed the employee to make confessions. When Mr Brown asked whether he could be shown the evidence, her response was “not yet”.  Not yet, why provide the evidence if you can squeeze out a confession? 

Ms Kendall put to the member that “in my experience, people were more likely to be accurate in their immediate response than any considered response”.  This was unacceptable pressure to make a confession where he had no information or awareness of what was being alleged.  The implication was that employees would be more likely to tell the truth of they didn’t go away to think about it or to check the evidence.

Again referring to her “experience” she observed that “there are two types of employees, those who accept their punishment and move on to end up with fulfilling jobs, and those who make trouble”. Leaving aside the employee is entitled to see and challenge any evidence, this is not procedurally fair, pressures an employee to cop it, fair or unfair, right or wrong.

Ms Kendall’s LinkedIn profile shows that her first HR job was Lake Macquarie in 2014 (and then that time included a “less than a year” secondment as AGM at Broken Hill), so had been in the HR job for less than a year before conducting the investigation. Still, she has an impressive asset management and engineering background.

When pressed by depa to check our member’s story with a witness who would be happy to be interviewed, they refused to do so. We said we would unless they objected (and they didn’t) and when we contacted the witness and asked for a statement about the circumstances, Ms Kendall then responded that our “contact … causes a significant concern and leads us to the view that we cannot be satisfied Mr X’s (witness name withheld) responses were made on the basis of his own knowledge and recollection of the relevant events alone”.  That is, the member being investigated lied, so did the witness, and so did I.

Remember, depa only contacted the witness because they refused to do so and they similarly refused to contact another witness we urged them to contact on one of the other allegations that was subsequently withdrawn.  They don’t want witnesses to get in the way of a good lynchin’.

Failing to provide evidence to a person under investigation is a chronic and substantial failure of procedural fairness.  In the end, a significant and punitive punishment was imposed but an appeal to GM Brian Bell resulted in his intervention and overriding most of Ms Kendall’s decisions and penalties in a way that properly recognised the failure to provide procedural fairness, the employee’s service and valuable contribution to the organisation and, in an embarrassing turnaround, also recognised the lack of training and skill of those who conducted the investigation.  More training needed please.

Well done Brian, you pulled this one out of the fire.

But, if it’s true that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, Ms Kendall and Mr Brown and their clumsy, sub- professional, venal and partial investigation may well do everyone a favour.

Ms Kendall to a greater extent than Mr Brown, can claim responsibility for our claim in our log of claims for the 2017 Award to fill out some detail in clause 39 Disciplinary Procedures where a Council is obliged to “properly conduct and speedily conclude an investigation”.  Ms Kendall showed that the Award needs to be more detailed, more explicit and more helpful to those who don’t understand that underlying every investigation is a presumption of innocence.  That’s why in claim number 16 you will find the 12 minimum requirements for procedural fairness we are pursuing to go into the 2017 Award.

Interestingly, the Director of Corporate Services has been conducting a review of the policy on investigation and disciplinary processes in parallel with this fiasco, we have spoken and provided a list of our 12 requirements of procedural fairness.  That was three months ago and we haven’t heard a peep since, despite chasing up before going to press with this issue.

So Lake Macquarie gets a nomination.

Mid-Western Regional Council

GM Brad Cam’s sacking of two directors at Mid-Western in 2015 has become notorious and, as often is the case in circumstances about which people will say “and the world changed forever”, people did start looking anew at the undesirability of a political decision to sack senior staff under those provisions which allow it in the OLG Senior Staff Standard Contract.

But Mid-Western gets another nomination this year not only because the settlement of our action on behalf of one of the directors happened in this calendar year, but because the Council compounded the problem and the questions about the appropriateness of sacking two directors during the currency of an ICAC investigation. The Council decided, when the ICAC report was provided to them confidentially but allowing the Council to determine whether it be dealt with in public or confidentially, they chose to keep it all quiet by dealing with it in a confidential session.  After which, the only official news was that the report and its recommendations were noted.

Brad Cam reminded us that it is not good public policy to have employment arrangements that allow the sacking of good people who are doing a good job - particularly in the sort of politicised employment environment that can often exist in local government with elected representatives wanting to call the shots, ride roughshod over planning instruments and proper compliance, and punish those trying to do the right thing.  

And, when the State Government has removed term contracts from their SES positions, then the question can reasonably be asked when that will also happen in local government?

So Mid-Western gets a nomination.

City of Sydney

The City of Sydney has been a nominee in 2014 and 2015.  Usually because their communication is confusing, there are glaciers that move faster than they do in the way they respond to issues and they constantly need to be pulled into line. This year, their tardiness and lack of concern for the health and well-being of their staff was evident in how they responded to an asbestos contamination accident in Town Hall House in October.

On 7 October, two very junior locksmith subcontractors, working for the contractor responsible for the maintenance of Town Hall House, drilled 14 fire doors containing asbestos without anyone knowing that they were doing it and without noticing that the door jams contained a warning that the doors contained asbestos fibre.

The City was told of the contamination at 11:40am on 7 October when someone from the contractor realised that this was happening.  The City was advised that doors had been drilled and that the doors contained asbestos but for reasons not yet properly explained (even though a dispute about this issue has been in the Commission already three times) no one at the City thought there was any need to send the employee’s home.

This meant that 900 or so employees remained on site with asbestos fibres contaminating 14 different areas in the building.  And they remained on-site for the remainder of the day, and as the contaminated sites were in the foyers and passageways to the toilets, anyone in the building on the relevant floors would have walked past the contaminated sites across carpet that has subsequently been replaced because of that contamination.

But the City has been very, very reluctant to disclose a whole range of things about the contamination.  While there is an external report with recommendations to be implemented pointed substantially to failures by the contractor, the unions simply didn’t understand how no-one at the City knew that the contractor intended to do this work.  How can that be?  While the work is contracted out, the City’s obligations to provide a safe and hazard free workplace remain the City’s.  

So we’ve been dealing with the City both in and out of the Commission, trying to understand why they regarded this as a low priority issue and how this kind of high risk contamination is really the contractor’s fault.  After half an hour of frustration, while the City’s property experts told us it was all about the contractors’ protocols needing to change but steadfastly ignoring any role for the City, we asked why they couldn’t simply email the contractor immediately after our meeting and tell them that they are not to set foot on the premises to do any work that may involve asbestos without prior knowledge.  And, who would have thought, in all of the covering of bums, they had already done that but hadn’t bothered to tell anyone. Why is it always that the first response is to protect the City and look like they are covering-up?  

Worse for us, was that we had been told by CEO Monica Barone that we would be given the report being done on what went wrong as soon as it was “completed and available” and then discovered that the report was received by unidentified people at the City at 7pm but it hadn’t been provided to the unions until more than 24 hours later.  Where had it been and what had the City been doing with it seeing it was clearly “completed and available”?  

The City’s original response was intentionally imprecise but on the second occasion before Commissioner Murphy, the IRC recommended that they reconsider that advice to provide more specific detail - particularly responding to our concern that it looked like no one cared what had happened to the report, or if they did, the CEO didn’t have a copy at 1:48pm the following day when she reassured us that we would get it when it was “completed and available”.

That information was provided in the Commission late on December 8 and the City has now confessed that after it had arrived at 7pm it was distributed to the executive including the CEO almost immediately and that when Ms Barone was emailing depa as the notifier of the dispute that we would receive it when it was “completed and available” she was sitting at her computer with the report in her inbox, where it had been since around 7pm the night before.  The City’s response was that she had a “very busy day” and while she had time to send me two emails reassuring us about getting the report, it was sitting right in front of her.

This is a disgrace.  It was bad enough when it looked like the report hadn’t found its way to the decision-makers but it’s even worse to know that the CEO, members of the executive and others had the report and the CEO had responded to us with what looks remarkably like a porky.  The report was completed and available when she told us that we would get it when it was completed and available.

This dispute will continue to unfold in 2017 as we insist upon proper recognition from the City about the risks of asbestos contamination at work and to make sure this sort of calamitous workplace health fiasco never, ever happens again.  Just how we continue to deal with the City, with what looks remarkably like the CEO's pants on fire, means that the City of Sydney gets a nomination as well.

And the winner is …

Four very different but very worthy nominations all of which are demonstrating, in one way or another, fundamental problems with the human resources management and the classic ingredients that makes a good nomination for the Worse HR in Local Government 2016.  Plus some duplicity, some incompetence, some demonstrable needs for significant and urgent training all made it very difficult to decide.

But the winner has to be Campbelltown.

We have history with the new GM Ms Deitz from the 2006 clumsy and sub-professional investigation we observed that made us file a dispute. At the time we told members that every time we said anything in our argument with the investigators about their process that Ms Dietz spent so much time rolling her eyes we wondered whether she had Tourette’s.  We knew she didn’t, (it was a joke), we just thought the eye rolling was a bit excessive and, here’s that word again, disrespectful.  

One would have hoped however that a woman GM, from a “caring” profession, would have been able in her close to two years acting and then appointed as GM, to make some improvements that live up to Campbelltown City’s boast of “Respect” as a significant corporate value.

As the first woman in the job of GM at Campbelltown, it’s one thing to be “humbled and excited” but it’s another thing to accept that when you’ve got the top job, you are the one responsible for ensuring respect and proper treatment of employees and, so far, in the processes that we’ve seen, the slipshod, ramshackle procedures of appointing, or being unable to appoint in the restructure, the total lack of proper information, the tendency to justify the unjustifiable, something better should be happening.

Campbelltown is the winner.  And we are committed to ensuring that, whether they like it or not, inadequate resourcing has to be dealt with and the GM and the Council generally need to treat their staff like they care and like they matter. 

And that’s pretty much the end of the year for us...

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Published: Tuesday, 20 December 2016 09:08

We are closing the office at midday on Friday 23 December, Margaret will be back on Wednesday 4 January and I’ll be back on Monday 9 January, as we always say, in a January-kind-of-way. 

All of our staff, members of the Committee of Management and President Andrew Spooner, now happily at Georges River, wish you a fun, love and family-filled Xmas and New Year and some even better HR in 2017 as we wonder what lies ahead.

Finally in news just arrived in my inbox (clearly a quicker response than Monica Barone can manage) Unions NSW has just emailed affiliates that “the Industrial Relations Commission of NSW will remain in the Chief Secretary’s Building, 47 Bridge Street, Sydney New South Wales 2000 until further notice as the accommodation at 66 Goulburn Street was deemed inadequate.” 

Well, whoever was responsible for the decision to move the Commission to the “inadequate” accommodation back in June must feel like a Right Dick.

The Ascension marks the death of the historic IRC

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Published: Tuesday, 13 December 2016 15:32

The Ascension

Well, sadly it has happened.  On 8 December, IRC President Michael Walton was sworn in to the Supreme Court.  The swearing-in, was part of the dismantling of the IRC that we have been forecasting accurately for more than 15 months - despite the reluctance of the Government and other significant players to admit they were about to kill off the venerable and century-old institution.

Not only were the rumours not killed off, on 3 August President Justice Michael Walton convened an audience with the parties to the State Award - LGNSW representing the employers, us, the USU and LGEA, to respond to concerns about changes within the IRC that had all of the indicators of confirming the rumours.  The courts and Registry in Wollongong would be closed, the registry in Newcastle would be closed, there was to be a common administrative system with all other courts within the Department of Justice and what had been a readily understandable maximum four number system for case references (for example, IRC 16/2016 etc) had morphed into a ludicrous ten number memory and intelligence test that everyone familiar with the old system failed.

While the President strenuously defended his good work protecting the continuation of the IRC by keeping it away from NCAT, he didn’t mention the other part of the equation - the Government’s plan was that he would be taking the Industrial Court under his arm and heading off to the Supreme Court, leaving the remnants of the IRC and their non-judicial roles to continue.   It could be that he didn’t know, or that he did know and couldn’t say …

So, when The Ascension occurred on 8 December, it had been preceded by advice from the Attorney-General, the Minister for Industrial Relations and the Department of Justice that the remaining Commissioners and the Industrial Registry from 9 January would open for business in 70 Goulburn Street.  That’s right, not folded into NCAT as we had predicted, but sharing a floor with NCAT where it can only be a matter of time before the final indignity will be inflicted upon the venerable and century-old tribunal.

And what a fiasco.  No consultation with the four Commissioners, all of whom were blind-sided by the announcement and none of whom had been invited for an inspection of the premises or consulted on the suitability of the Government’s proposals for the work that the remaining Commissioners would carry out.   The plan of the floor shared with NCAT provides for four small courts (when the Government has committed to there being five Commissioners, including a Chief Commissioner who has not yet been appointed) but these small rooms provide seating for a maximum of eight.  This is a completely impractical arrangement because on probably the majority of proceedings, there will be more than eight people looking for a seat.  In our industry, there can be more than eight people at an individual Council dispute when you consider that there could be upwards of four representatives of Management plus representatives of the three unions etc.  Everyone will have to fight it out and scramble for a seat when the music stops.

But it gets worse.  Clearly the Government neither understands, nor cares how the IRC works: the primary function of the IRC is to settle disputes between parties by conciliation but there are no conference rooms where one party can meet separately with the Commissioner, or wait while a Commissioner meets separately with the other side.  This happens every day in the IRC and the current accommodation, the beautiful Chief Secretary’s building in Bridge Street (which one day you may get to visit as an exclusive international hotel) can accommodate both sides, or separate sides when there are differences of opinion between the unions, or even multiple employers, in multiple conference rooms.

The rooms and the accommodation are not fit for purpose and this can only be described as a farce that could only have been worse if our observation that with a small group of Commissioners and electronic communication, they could all find themselves in a Tarago, looking for parking around the city, was something other than a joke. As we publish this issue of depaNews there is informal advice that the move is off until September, but we will hold off on this because we normally don’t give any credit to informal sources.

Leaving that aside, this is a tragedy of the worst kind.  The Commissioners are left to fend for themselves in substandard accommodation, inconsistent with their primary obligation to bring parties to a dispute together by conciliation and subsequent agreement, and in an arrangement that will, in time, simply get worse...

Everyone has seen the model that the Government is using - dodgy owners of heritage properties know this strategy only too well - they fail to maintain it, they let it rot and decay, and then all that can be done with it is demolition and redevelopment.  Shame. 

We give OLG’s Employment Reference Group another chance

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Published: Tuesday, 13 December 2016 15:32

Over the last two months we have run stories critical of the unnecessarily confidential approach being taken by the Government in amalgamating councils when both the industry and the community deserve a transparent and open process.

We managed to shame the Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) into lifting the confidentiality of the “savings targets” they had imposed on merged councils.  There was no need for these to be confidential;  there were probably 100 people in the industry with access to their confidential information anyway and many of them were employees compromised about trying to keep quiet things that affected their workmates and colleagues; it required councils to put at risk their obligations to disclose decisions made that would create significant effects on employees under clause 39 Workplace Change and Redundancy of the State Award – it was nothing more than a clumsy, officious and petulant restriction.  None of anyone’s business, they reckoned.

We also questioned the validity of the Employment Matters Reference Group, established by OLG to draw on the expertise of LGNSW and the unions on employment issues but regularly hampered and frustrated by restrictions imposed by the bureaucrats at DPC.  But, despite our reservations, we attended the last meeting of the year on 29 November and found a welcoming and conciliatory approach.  OLG was never the problem and we had to remember that we were dealing with two Government agencies here but Steve Orr, the Executive Director, Local Government Reform had more significant things to do (hard to imagine, given his title) and he was unable to attend.   The meeting proceeded in such a pleasant and consultative manner that when it came time to agree on the date for the next meeting, we chose a date when we knew Steve would be unavailable.  A very practical approach to keep us all focused on the positive nature of the Reference Group rather than the negative.

But, making the Government lift confidentiality restrictions on things they wanted to keep confidential is one thing, there has to be an equal and opposite action in response, hasn’t there?

And there was.  The Administrators and IGMs were in town for their normal monthly catch up which became a bit of an Xmas/end of year event attended by politicians and government bureaucrats as well.  While they invited representatives of the USU, depa was left off the invitation list.  Really …

Are things going any better at Sydney City with their asbestos contamination?

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Published: Tuesday, 13 December 2016 15:32

No, but more next week.

Who has the worst HR in local government this year?

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Published: Tuesday, 13 December 2016 15:32

Our special issue of depaNews, focusing on the four nominations for the worst HR in local government will be published next week.  Here is a hint for one of the nominated councils:

Sydney mishandles asbestos contamination in Town Hall House

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Published: Tuesday, 29 November 2016 13:04

The City of Sydney celebrated November as Asbestos Awareness Month with a succession of compulsory conferences in the Industrial Relations Commission over the way they handled asbestos contamination in their Town Hall House on 7 October.  Just when it looked like the City had survived an entire year with no criticism from us of their processes, their general lack of commitment to employee welfare, their propensity for confused and confusing communication and all from an organisation boasting of its transparent processes and interest in providing documents to whomever wants them, they deliver an asbestos contamination fiasco containing all those things – but the transparency.

On 7 October, subcontractors of the contractor responsible for maintenance in Town Hall House (where there can be 900 or more employees every day plus tenants) drilled holes in fire doors, the majority of which were clearly marked as containing asbestos, and, before they were stopped by someone working for the contractor Brookfield Global Integrated Solutions (BGIS), had contaminated fire stairs and foyers in fourteen separate areas on ten different floors.

While the City was advised in an email at 11:14am that the doors had been drilled and that they contained asbestos (and the sub-contractors had fled the building) the City allowed employees to continue working until the end of their normal working day which, for most would be six hours after the advice was provided.  And given that employees can only go to a toilet in Town Hall House by walking past the fire doors, or even using the stairs, that would mean many would have walked right past the contamination, or over it.

The City also allowed employees rostered to work on Saturday and Sunday to come to work. Uh oh…

While first raised at 11:14, nothing happened to alert employees to the risk and no steps were taken to manage the risks until at 2:48pm when the City advised staff that the fire doors were closed to conduct “air sampling testing,” and not using the word “asbestos” at all.

Asbestos fibres had been released from the doors but it was not until the Sunday that a hygienist recommended that Town Hall House be closed to allow the cleanup - something that then took two more days. 

In the way the City normally communicates, the immediate advice to employees failed to mention that they would be paid for the day the building was closed. That’s when the investigation of processes, what went wrong, how this occurred, who was responsible for the City’s response, whether it should have been accelerated to a higher level of the organisation, who made what decisions etc, began.

And then the to-ing and fro-ing with the City - their Manager Corporate Human Resources and the CEO about what had happened; when we could meet (Monday was offered by the City but then withdrawn because of “conflicting diary commitments” - that is, their people had better things to do) and they offered the rest of the week up to Thursday, demonstrating that they didn’t share our urgency; some confusing messages about when we would get the report; all culminating in our frustration and the filing of an industrial dispute on 3 November.  The dispute was listed before Commissioner Murphy on Monday 7 November.  There were many questions flushed out of the conference chaired by the Commissioner.

There are so many things wrong with this process that it’s hard to know where to start and it now seems that the ten questions we originally asked of the City have been compounded by two other issues. First, that carpet tiles have been replaced potentially for fear of asbestos contamination and may not have been removed consistent with asbestos handling guidelines and second, that the closure of the fire doors (except in an emergency!) could have been a breach of those provisions of the EP&A Act preventing the obstruction of fire doors.

Following the proceedings before the Commission, we wrote to the City on 9 November and included the ten questions developed during the IRC proceedings.  We added to those ten questions the two additional issues about the replacement of the tiles and breaching the EP&A Act. 

While we filed the dispute because it didn’t appear that the City was taking the issue seriously and the communication was indolent, confusing and frustrating, the CEO responded at 1:48pm on Thursday 17 of November that “as I have advised you will get the report in full, when it is completed and available”.  But, as we discovered, the report had been completed and was available to the City at 7pm the night before.  Where it had been in the hours up until the CEO’s advice to depa remains a mystery and it was not forwarded to the unions until 7:45pm that night.

There are more questions at this stage than there are answers even though the issue has been the subject of two compulsory conferences and will return to the Commission on 8 December.

While the actual issue itself is a disgraceful performance with insufficient concern for the welfare of employees, we run the risk of losing sight of the issues about the asbestos contamination while we chase the CEO for an honest answer about when she became aware of the report being “completed and available” and, if it wasn’t provided to her the night before, why not.  And if it was, why tell us that we would get it when it was completed and available when it was already completed and available, and possibly in her hands?

Either she hadn’t received the report by 1:48pm (and that means it was withheld from her by someone from 7pm the night before) or she had the report while she was busy telling us that she didn’t. Let’s hope we don’t have a pants on fire moment here.

The City did respond to the ten questions but needed more time on the carpet tiles and EP&A Act questions.  They responded that “the report was received by members of Executive and key internal staff” and “once members of the Executive and key internal stakeholders had an opportunity to review the report”.  Yes, but who had it after 7pm?  And, when did the CEO see it?

Commissioner Murphy on 21 October recommended that the City provide further answers to the unions, not just on who had the report and what was happening to it while they were busy telling us they didn’t have it, but on fundamental issues like why the City didn’t know work was being done on fire doors, how they still don’t know how many carpet tiles were replaced, or where, or how they were replaced.

In a city with such a high reputation for its progressive and valuable work in planning, public transport and sustainability, their responses to the legitimate concerns of the unions, and to us as the notifier of the dispute, is hypocritical and unacceptable.