Looks like an early favourite for our Worst HR Award
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- Published: Monday, 22 July 2013 13:19
There is never a shortage of poor HR decisions in local government. It’s amazing the number of miscreants, sociopaths, people-haters and venal simpletons who find their way into HR and management councils. Every year there is always a handful of councils that contest our prestigious Worst HR in Local Government Award, traditionally announced in our December issue.
And while things might happen during the year which give a clear indication that one Council may simply edge out the rest, is unusual to have a hot favourite emerge only halfway through the year.
How about this Council (which will remain nameless until the bookies properly set the odds) as an early favourite:
- Fought the LGEA by contesting their claim that 18 engineers should get the Civil Liability Allowance and when the Commission looked at it, the 18 got it! And they spent more than $50,000 in legal costs to fight it.
- A Director of Corporate Services with anger management issues who shouted at representatives of the unions at a Consultative Committee meeting telling them that they knew nothing about industrial relations, he was the only expert because he’d done it for five years (when there were delegates there who had done it for decades) and when his boorish and boof-headed behaviour found the Council in the Commission and he was caught out, “apologized” in a smug and self-important email that satisfied no-one and, of course, wasn’t game to turn up in the Commission himself anyway.
- As part of a restructure made a couple of USU members redundant and then tried to cheat them out of their 1 July Award pay increase. Unsuccessfully, of course.
- One of the only councils in NSW to not have a policy regulating contact between councillors and staff when implicit in the Code of Conduct is that Councillor contact should only happen consistent with the policy. Maybe the only Council. Does any other Council not have a policy?
- Suspend two employees, have an “independent” investigation conducted which, when it didn’t provide the result they wanted, referred it to a barrister for review to try to unpick it to set it aside. Their independent investigation with their investigator, should be enough.
And that’s just for starters. More next month.