We accept LGNSW offer for a new State Award

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Published: Monday, 19 June 2017 11:54

On 2 June, the LGNSW Board endorsed an offer to be made to the three unions for the new 2017 Local Government State Award. This was formally provided to the unions late that afternoon.

The offer was individually emailed to members at 9:20am on Monday 5 June (not a bad turnaround, early in the morning of the next business day) with an explanatory email and three links. The first, a nine page attachment identifying the changes and particularly those that would provide benefits to our members, the second a copy of what the Award would look like with the proposed changes marked up and the third, the recommended Guidelines on Workplace Investigations.

We acknowledge the contribution of Lake Macquarie Council - in conducting such a heinous, prejudicial and clumsy investigation last year - that we felt obliged to pursue twelve fundamental requirements of procedural fairness which was supported by the other unions and ultimately also by LGNSW and they found their way both into the Award and by reference into the Guidelines. No more hanging prosecutors/judges when Lake Macquarie complies with these guidelines next time they conduct a workplace investigation and, if they do train people who revealed shortcomings in the exercise, no more nominations for the Golden Turd either.

Members had the opportunity of responding to the documents up until the close of business on Wednesday 14 June and the recommendation was made to the Committee, providing each of the individual responses from members so that the Committee would be aware of the feedback, to accept the offer.

The Committee of Management has now unanimously accepted the offer in an email and a letter with our characteristic clarity.

It’s no secret that we were disappointed at the way LGNSW conducted the negotiations. While we look forward to the Award being made now by Commissioner Murphy in the IRC on 30 June, and there is little point complaining about the change of historic attitude evidenced by the behaviour of the LGNSW, we hope next time that we can resort to the cooperation historically provided by LGNSW rather than the unhelpful attitude displayed this time.

Uh oh, …

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Published: Monday, 19 June 2017 11:54

Only a couple of months for local government elections in September 2017 which will see elections for the first time in the twenty merged councils.

The mergers, which involved the sacking of Auburn, Hurstville and Parramatta, to nominate just three at random, meant that councillors who were making life hard for nearly everyone as they looked after their own interests were sacked - to be replaced by administrators to act as the Council to merge the previously existing local governments into larger, more vibrant and better financed organisations.

But there is significant speculation some of those councillors mercifully removed by the proclamation may be back. We have been critical of the soft provisions of the Local Government Act which led to an inability to remove councillors behaving badly. Short periods of suspension which are voided by councils being sacked mean that, unlike the rugby league season when you are penalised and the suspension and the games missed carries over to the next season, these people just get away with it.

And the courts, whether it be NCAT on appeal or the Supreme Court, show a reluctance to support the standing down of democratically elected people, regardless of their behaviour, simply because they are democratically elected. The fact that idiots, shonks, dodgy closet developers, bullies, Code of Conduct breachers, those who fail to declare financial interests, self-seekers and crooks are elected democratically doesn’t provide them with a halo, or a mantel of respectability.

Something has to be done.

Next month, we’ll run through a few of the suspensions and also our proud history of implementing bans and supporting members as they stand up for themselves against unacceptable Councillor behaviour. We’ve been doing it for more than a decade, we shouldn’t have to do, but more next month.

It’s also time to remind members that the best thing you can do for your workmates, because you never really know how councils will be constituted in a couple of months’ time, is to encourage them to join depa and get with the strength. Do your friends a favour and you can do yourself a favour as well.

Do yourself a favour

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Published: Monday, 19 June 2017 11:54

We provide members with a reward if they encourage new members to join by providing a bottle of wine for every two members nominated. In the lead up to seeing what sort of councillors we end up with in September, and the need for employees in the difficult areas where our members work to be protected, it gets even better.

We will provide a bottle of good wine for every member nominated. So get recruiting, and we’ll send you something nice for dinner. Or dinners, if you go hard for it.

Molly would be thrilled.

Nine days to go …

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Published: Wednesday, 24 May 2017 13:03

On Friday 2 June the Board of Local Government New South Wales will consider recommendations from their industrial relations staff to make a formal offer to the three unions for the 2017 Local Government State Award.

Only nine days to go...

In March we reported that the historic cooperation from LGNSW had disappeared. Something’s happened to the negotiators to restrain the cooperative approach to fixing those parts of the Award that we know need to be fixed and to keep the Award modern and relevant. Since that time we’ve continued to meet and had a succession of days of conciliation before Commissioner Murphy in the IRC to bring us together on those issues where we remained apart.

The Committee of Management considered a report at the last meeting on 15 May about Award clauses where “in principle” agreement had been reached between the negotiators which, with potential changes to the Workplace Change and Redundancy clause and a consensus on pay increases over the next three years, would form the basis of an offer subject to endorsement by the LGNSW Board.

At this stage, there is no offer and there is no agreement. There are more than 20 areas of the Award where the negotiators have reached a common view but there is nothing formal until the Board meets to formally resolve a position and then convey that as an offer to the unions.

We are hoping for the best.

Mind you, it doesn’t help when you sit down to negotiate pay increases to know that the CPI is running at 2.1%, that wages growth over the last 12 months is around 1.9% generally or 2.3% in the public sector. Still ...

There is still work being done to bring together agreed wording on clause 39 Workplace Change and redundancy and some other minor matters.

If the Board endorses the package of changes we are hoping for, a formal offer will be made late the following week to allow the unions time to consider it - or will have further conciliation if there are issues where we remain in dispute.

If agreement can be reached, the Commission has listed a hearing for the Award to be made on 30 June.

We don’t like being gagged and we pull the pin on the EMRG

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Published: Wednesday, 24 May 2017 13:03

In depaNews in October last year we advised members of the facade that had been established by OLG and DPC under the guise of drawing on the expertise of the three unions and the employers in the industry giving advice to the Government on employment issues as the mergers rolled out.

It was, at that stage, facadism at its worst - masquerading as a transparent consultative mechanism when the reality was that we were getting more confidential information sent to us by people who shouldn’t do so and then we would distribute it to the Reference Group, wondering why we didn’t have it. That opened up access to more information than the Government had, up until that stage, been prepared to provide.

And our strategy of threatening the merged councils with industrial disputes for failing to disclose significant changes in their workforce because the Government wouldn’t allow them to provide details of cost-cutting measures they were being forced to make and to keep confidential unlocked more critical information.

So we made the Employment Matters Reference Group a more useful, transparent and consultative body than the government originally intended.

But the Reference Group require that the deliberations of the group be not disclosed and sometimes being gagged, in the context of industrial disputes when that information would be critical, is an unacceptable restriction. Particularly in an unpleasant and drawn out battle with Georges River and their belligerent position on section 354D.

So, it’s our history now that OLG has reminded councils that the protection under section 354 D of the Local Government Act is indefinite and not restricted to the three years as the boofheads at Georges River, in particular, were insisting.

But how the matter was raised by us in the IRC in the dispute has become a problem. So, having made them construct a more transparent and open consultative group, we’ve pulled the pin.

Courts nail clumsy and secretive handling of Council mergers

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Published: Wednesday, 24 May 2017 13:03

First it was the Court of Appeal finding for Ku-ring-gai in their challenge to the Government’s attempt to merge that Council with most of Hornsby. When we say “most of Hornsby”, that was something the smart people in government missed because the fundamental reason why the Court of Appeal found for Ku-ring-gai was the section of the Local Government Act under which they had acted to merge all of Ku-ring-gai and most of Hornsby, relied upon merging “two local government areas”. And the Court found they didn’t have two local government areas, they had one local government area and another local government area with part of it “excised”. Do’h! A dumb mistake.

And persuasive as well was the Government’s insistence that the KPMG report, containing what the Government and their delegates claimed was compelling financial evidence of efficiencies and cost savings, be a confidential document. What is this Government and its obsession with confidentiality? If you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t need confidentiality.

And then the High Court has decided to provide leave to appeal to Woollahra to contest the Government’s proposal to force the amalgamation of Woollahra with Randwick and Waverley. Again, based significantly on the government’s obsession to keep the KPMG report confidential. And Randwick now looks like joining in - despite Randwick and Waverley for years having happily embraced each other with a view to voluntary merger if they needed to.

LGS restores uranium nuclear screening

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Published: Wednesday, 26 April 2017 08:45

26 April marks 31 years since the largest nuclear energy disaster in history at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. The disaster contaminated a huge area of the Ukraine, now known as the Chernobyl exclusion zone covering around 2600 km². The public are excluded from the area, both flora and fauna are contaminated forever and there has been significant animal, fish and human birth abnormalities and deformities. And the area is contaminated forever.

The disaster highlighted the significant risk associated with nuclear energy - as if it needed to be highlighted.

LGS has always taken the concept of responsible and sustainable investment more seriously than the rest of Australia’s superannuation funds - since 2000 when the fund decided not to own tobacco and to develop screening arrangements to reduce investment in nuclear/uranium, businesses with poor forestry practices (like Gunns), gambling etc. etc.

These screening practices have won LGS many accolades from responsible investment organisations, including being ranked number one in the world in the prestigious and authoritative Asset Owners Disclosure Project, twice.

But, despite my reluctance to personalise these issues, pretty much as soon as I had resigned as a director on the LGS Board after 16 years of primary responsibility for the introduction of these responsible investment commitments, a couple of pro-nuclear zealots on the Board thought it made sense to dismantle the Board’s historic screening against uranium and nuclear industries because of the stupid and misconceived understanding that nuclear energy did not produce carbon emissions. Stupid bastards.

We never let go of this, placing a clock on our homepage so that the world could see how many days it had been since that stupid decision was made back in September 2014. It would be a timely reminder of the decision and a constant nagging of the stupid bastards to recognise that the advice they had at the time was right - that there would be no investment advantage and that there would only be reputational damage.

LGS has now announced that the uranium/nuclear screening will be restored. Here is their media release. You will note that it doesn’t say that they should have taken advice from their own investment people at the time, they shouldn’t have behaved like a group of single-issue Montgomery Burns, that seeing nuclear technology as a solution for a low carbon future was one-dimensional thinking at its worst - like thinking that a mass murderer might be okay if they were good-looking and had nice manners. A little bit simplistic and wrong-headed. Stupid bastards.

But, good for them for acknowledging their folly and repairing the damage.

A wasted 965 days, more than two and a half years where people scratched their heads and wondered what kind of loonies had taken over the Board.

Our representative on the Board after the decision had been made, Sam Byrne, pursued this but the decision to restore the screening was a unanimous vote, so clearly everyone had come around to recognise that it was a mistake to remove it. Nice work. There may be a few stupid bastards still involved, but at least they’ve done this.

And we’ve decided to announce this on the anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Just to remind us that nuclear technology is not a viable energy source for a low carbon future when there are so many other renewable energy sources without the disadvantages or risks.

As the Chernobyl disaster happened at 1:24am in the Ukraine (seven hours behind Sydney time) on 26 April, the clock was removed from our homepage at that time.

And in a bit of a scoop and brilliant news for the historic and now reinstated commitment to responsible and sustainable investment, LGS was today announced as the top rated International fund (from a field of 600 institutional investors) in the prestigious and authoritative Asset Owners Disclosure Project.

This means that LGS is, without any doubt, the leading responsible and sustainable investment fund in Australia and it's a fabulous result for the commitment of the recently resigned CEO Peter Lambert who has ensured over more than a decade that the resolve of the Board to do precisely that, has been delivered.

The Hills Shire embraces commitment to health and wellbeing in 2017 Enterprise Agreement

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Published: Thursday, 20 April 2017 11:46

The Hills Shire GM Dave Walker

This really is the best of times, the age of wisdom, the epoch of belief, the season of light, the spring of hope.

The Hills Shire will have a commitment to health and wellbeing for their staff light years in advance of anything else operating in local government. An unrestrained arrangement allowing access to two days sick leave for health and wellbeing activities based solely on what the employee believes will assist and improve their health and wellbeing and renouncing the constraints and rigidity of restricting this entitlement to preventative medical appointments. The agreement contains the following words:

Reasons for health and wellbeing days would fit generally within concepts of health, fitness, exercise, improved health benefits, as well as mental health in times of stress.

One of our claims in the 2014 Award negotiations was a response to the evidence at the time about the increasing levels of obesity in Australia. Statistically, we’re all getting fatter, it’s not doing us any good and it’s not helping us aesthetically either. At the time there was a general acknowledgement between the unions and LGNSW that found its way into the Award in clause 24 Health and Wellbeing where subclause (i) records:

The parties of the Award recognise that workplace health and wellbeing programs can lead to positive outcomes such as improved employee work performances and productivity, improved employee recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism, and other benefits.

But while the parties to the Award recognised this, a restrictive template developed by LGNSW’s HR inhibitors and an agreement that councils were simply “encouraged to develop workplace health and/or wellbeing programs”, rather than being forced to do so, meant that in the intervening three years little progress was made.

Until a courageous general manager, somewhat surprisingly to some in the form of The Hills Shire GM Dave Walker, decided to embrace the concept in enterprise agreement negotiations that had been going on since the end of last year. Let’s face it, if everyone agrees with subclause (i), then someone had to do something about it, didn’t they. And Dave did.

Clause 28 of the EA, now endorsed by the Industrial Relations Commission to operate from 1 July 2017 is provided as a link below but the significance of the clause is that it has no preconceptions about what employees need for their health and wellbeing.

It is a bold and courageous step - embracing the evidence that improved levels of health and wellbeing will provide productivity improvements, not just in reducing sick leave but better productivity while employees are at work as well, and a significant trust in employees that, at this stage, no other Council has been prepared to match.

At The Hills, you make a written request for one or two days from your sick leave for a particular purpose and explain how this will benefit your health and wellbeing, and your Manager can approve it. No restrictions, a reliance upon employees not abusing the process and the encouragement for a relationship between employees and their supervisors of disclosure, awareness of what will make people feel better and a real focus on employees thinking about what will improve their wellbeing and provide benefits for them and for the Council.

Dave Walker is now retiring, shortly to leave The Hills after running a Council with progressive policies, bonus arrangements and, more importantly, openness, transparency and honesty in dealing with staff.

We will miss Dave and we wish him well.

While we are continuing discussions with LGNSW aiming for a requirement that each Council must develop a policy of health and wellbeing, Dave did something about it. Who will be next?

If you’d like to take this challenge up at your Council, here is the email to Dave with nine critical points that Dave embraced and found its way into the clause, and here is the clause.

And just to show that we think everyone is capable of development and moving out of the age of foolishness, incredulity, Darkness and despair, we’ve claimed that the City of Sydney embrace what The Hills has done in the current award negotiations there. How do you reckon that will go?

A Tale of Two Cities

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Published: Thursday, 20 April 2017 11:13

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going directly the other way…

What a fabulous opening first line for anything. It is, of course, the opening first line to Charles Dickens’ most-read book, a Tale of Two Cities, the second most popular book in the English language with more than 200 million copies sold. It’s hard to imagine a book that anyone is more unlikely to have not read.

And it’s an appropriate lead into two cities that really are the best of times and the worst of times, wisdom and foolishness, Light and Darkness...

We make Sydney’s CEO Monica Barone apologise

We’ve often remarked on the paradox which is Sydney City. Fabulous progressive policies on transport, planning, community-building, sustainability and the environment but an approach to dealing with their employees more consistent with the middle of the 20^th century. How does this happen?

Nominated for our Worst HR in Local Government Awards for the past three years and a reputation sufficient for us to include in our Log of Claims in the current Sydney City award negotiations a claim to “insert claim”.

On Friday 7 October last year a couple of hapless apprentice locksmiths, employees of a sub-contractor to the contractor managing Town Hall House, without anyone knowing, started drilling fire doors clearly marked as containing asbestos to change door hardware and spilled asbestos fibres in 14 different places. This was a catastrophic collapse of procedures and protocols which resulted in an asbestos contamination in Town Hall House that put at risk the health and wellbeing of 900 employees. The catastrophic collapse included not just contamination in 14 separate places but decision-making that the building did not need to be evacuated based on incomplete and inaccurate information. The building should have been evacuated on the morning of 7 October and it wasn’t.

Employees continued to work in the building on Saturday and Sunday until the extent of the contamination was properly understood. The building was closed Monday and Tuesday with employees prevented from gaining access for the cleanup to be done properly. That the thorough cleanup required the place to be closed for two full days is evidence of the significance of the contamination and the failure of its management by both the City, the city’s contractor and the sub-contractors. A classic collapse of the contracting out model.

But getting information from the Council proved to be far from the boasting on their website about openness and transparency. Cover-up, obstruction, a dispute filed by us and listed on seven occasions in the Industrial Relations Commission where we were supported vigorously by the USU and LGEA until finally, like squeezing blood from a stone, we did get what we were looking for: a commitment by the Council that steps had been taken and what those steps were to ensure that never again will the City not know that there are people drilling holes in fire doors in their building, releasing asbestos fibres and putting everyone at risk. And, an apology from a reluctant and recalcitrant CEO.

For those interested in the gory details, here is our 20 March letter pursuing the three outstanding issues, the reply of 3 April from the Council’s solicitors Henry Davis York explaining the steps that have been taken in yet another proposed draft email for the CEO. The pressure was on, Commissioner Murphy had made it clear that if we couldn’t reach agreement ourselves on this, he would resolve it on 10 April. We responded suggesting that we needed these words added:

I apologise that this matter wasn’t handled well and guarantee you that processes have now been set up to ensure that this doesn’t happen again.

And here, significantly is the final apology issued by CEO Monica Barone on 11 April where she finishes by saying:

I apologise for any concern this incident may have caused and assure you that we have implemented processes to improve our procedures and avoid a similar event in the future.

The unions agreed with these words. We had adjourned the proceedings on 10 April with a request that it be discontinued on 12 April unless the Commission heard otherwise from us, just in case, given our lack of confidence in the way the City behaves.

The CEO’s apology to staff should have been provided immediately. It should not have required the unions to pursue her on seven occasions in the IRC and, eventually have her agree to do it because it was clear (certainly to the unions) that if she didn’t do so, the IRC would make her.

We know people make mistakes, everyone knows people make mistakes, we teach our kids that it’s better to clear the deck with an apology, but getting an apology from the CEO when clearly the City was at fault and responsible says a lot about the City that is unattractive and unacceptable.

The dispute was discontinued on 12 April, more than six months after the fiasco in October. This has been a shameful process. And, while we may have made Ms Barone do this, we still don’t have an apology from her for lying to us that we would get the consultant’s report into the fiasco when it was “completed and available” at 1:48pm when she and others at the City had it at 7 o’clock the night before. It had been in her inbox all the time when she sent two emails telling us we would get it when it was available and we didn’t get it until that evening when it was completed and available 24 hours earlier.

Sydney City is the worst of times, in an age of foolishness, in an epoch of incredulity, in a season of Darkness and the winter of despair.

Cripes, where was the compassion?

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Published: Wednesday, 29 March 2017 15:22

It was at the start and now at the finish.

If you’re about to go on parental leave, if you know someone who is about to go on parental leave, or if you’re just feeling amorous enough to get home tonight and do something that might mean parental leave would be relevant for you in the future, please remember to let us know*.

If you let us know we will continue your membership for free.  That means you continue to receive the benefits of membership while you are on parental leave and we do this because we have had far too many members needing help to arrange suitable flexible or part-time arrangements for their return to work.  Too many of our women members discover that the Council isn’t quite as helpful as they could be about a part-time return to work and we will act for you even though you not paying your fees.

How about that!

*Just to be clear, please only let us know that you might need parental leave in the future, not that you’re feeling amorous today.