Sydney City can’t help being nominated for our HR awards

• 
• 

Details

Published: Monday, 17 February 2020 12:55

What is it with Sydney City? The City, boasting its progressive credentials in employment, has been nominated more than any other Council in our annual Worst HR Local Government awards. This progressive stuff is simply a façade, inclusion is gorgeous, we all support it, but getting a finger out and dealing with an application by your own managers for the introduction of nine day fortnight for their staff, consistent with the provisions in the City Award allowing this process to be considered, shouldn’t be sitting around ignored for almost a year.

We had members involved in the drafting of that submission to which there was no proper response, then members resolving that we do what we could to get some action happening under the terms provided expressly in the Award, which we did, to be confronted with the City’s Impossible GoSlow. A phenomenon where all HR issues can go to die.

And when our dispute is listed in the IRC, the City admits it doesn’t have a “process” to consider such an application, the latest in a series of attempted fob offs which included refusing to respond to our request about which policies or procedures should be addressed in an application - with some HR flunky saying they couldn’t be specified because it could be all of them.

In the IRC on 28 January, Commissioner Sloan was able to squeeze from the City’s lawyer an undertaking that they would identify the policies and procedures that needed to be addressed by the end of the following week. And just like the City, we received their advice at 4:50pm on Friday afternoon! That really is taking literally the concept of the end of the week.

But the letter contained no surprises, they identified the Code of Conduct, Leave Guidelines, their Work Health and Safety Policy and their Overtime Guidelines. These were not just four basic obvious policies that had been considered by those managers who drafted the proposal in March 2019, they were damning evidence that the City’s response to us was nothing more than BS. Our first 2020 nomination, will it be seven years of nominations for the City?

Six nominations for the Golden Turd since 2014, every year in fact, so there must be some common factor, something bogging stuff down to an Impossible GoSlow, and frustrating everyone since 2013...