2024 depa award for The Worst HR in Local Government
- Details
- Published: Friday, 13 December 2024 11:54
How’s HR been this year?
The big achievement of the year for us was the culmination of 36 years of railing against the inappropriateness of term contracts regulating employment - a system that allows councils to get rid of good employees. And railing against the inappropriateness of term contracts for senior staff in the Local Government Act 1993 for 31 years, and in the Exposure Draft Bill for two years preceding that. It’s been a long battle.
It’s a long and painful history, which says a lot about our true grit, the NSW Government deleted reference to senior staff (other than general manager) from the Local Government Act and transitioned existing senior staff across the coverage under the Award or relevant Enterprise in June this year.
It is a significant achievement to roll the protections against unfair dismissal for all other employees in local government to the second level of Council management.
Moves to remove or restrict Working From Home have evolved into a fairly common arrangement of two days a week WFH, and the remainder of the week in the office, with variations between councils about whether an RDO should be taken from home days or the office days. The better arrangements provide flexibility.
Councils are getting used to the rights of employees to disconnect (introduced in clause 21.F of the 2023 State Award), we know many employees are asserting that right, and managers are recognising it. Our four point clarity in the State Award is a much clearer, and facilitative provision, than the more complicated and less facilitative arrangements later adopted federally by Fair Work early this year.
And bit by bit, councils are also acknowledging their obligation to “provide adequate staff and other resources to enable employees to carry out the duties and functions over the course of working hours that are not unreasonable”.
We know from our survey of members during the year that councils are still running understaffed, are still reluctant to pay proper market rates to fill jobs but are more often accepting reduced performance targets to accommodate the number of staff. The obligations under clause 10(ii) give councils a choice - they can spend the money and fill the jobs, or they can adjust expectations.
If your Council hasn’t adjusted their expectations, let us know.
This is the sixteenth year we had of awarded The Golden Turd and it has to be a good sign that we have fewer nominations this year than we have in the past.
We could provide dishonourable mentions:
- again, to those inflicting misery at the City of Ryde;
- the continued embarrassment at Mid Coast, the salary system dispute resolved in February, and some astonishing stupidity with a councillor asking a fundamental question about whether assertions made in depaNews about Mid Coast having won the Golden Turd were true, which ended up in the Federal Court and made the Council look like fools (August issue) but the more venal approach to employees has been modified;
- the worst letter ever written by a CEO to an employee, where the CEO describes themselves in the first person, the second person and even the third person, at Greater Hume;
- Liverpool’s uncooperative resistance as we tried to resolve the folly of decisions putting people in the new Administrative Centre - not just the inappropriate work spaces, but the decision that employees with Council cars they need to do inspections twice a day should be parked 10 or more minutes away, potentially walking there in the rain (or the dark) with files, and wasting more than half an hour of work time in doing so, rather than in the basement of the building, where employees who don’t need to leave the office during the day, get preference because of their status and influence, and the continuing resistance to providing proper sun protection on windows facing west;
- and, the proposal by a relatively new GM at Shoalhaven to restructure in a way that would have created a mega department (that also at the same time separated some of our compliance people from the rest) and that favoured one member of senior staff (the one who went gaga and made last years’ nominations) and would dislocate many - only resolved by what is known now as the “murder-suicide”, when after the local government election a new council encouraged the exit of the GM, and the GM as a final gesture confidentially settled the exit of the Director of Corporate Services;
But when it comes to the crunch, for incompetence and/or ignorance in managing termination processes; for letting decisions be made by people with no experience or knowledge; for providing spreadsheets containing information on tax rates which were accurate and were relied upon by the affected employees, then claiming they were inaccurate based on sub-professional advice after the Council months later changed their mind, and took too much tax, then extended an apology to depa for having got it wrong.
But they hadn’t, their only apology and confession was yet another mistake - as was revealed during the industrial dispute we filed when the Council accepted that it should have been the lower tax rate all along.
All this confusion, the complete disregard for the welfare and wellbeing of our three terminated members, we only have one nomination and declare them the winners unopposed. An unchallenged winner.
If you need more information, here is a link to the August issue of depaNews, which was completely focussed on this dreadful process.
Eurobodalla Shire Council wins the Award for the Worst HR in Local Government in 2024.
(Please note, we would normally feature one or more of the people responsible, but consistent with an undertaking given to the Industrial Relations Commission during our dispute with Eurobodalla, we are not naming the two primary culprits or the job titles.)