Aged care workers struggle for a fair deal

Vanguard May 2013 p. 9
(Contributed)

If it is not you personally, it will be one of your relatives who in the future will need the care provided by workers in residential aged care or community direct care.

They are the ‘poor relation’ of the broad health care workforce. Historically their wages and conditions have been inferior to workers in public and private hospitals. To a large extent, they have been invisible like the aged care industry, reflecting capitalist society’s neglect of working people who have aged and are no longer able to produce surplus value through their labour power.

However times are changing. In the last few years, aged care workers have been campaigning for respect and improvement in their pay and conditions. Through their three unions in the industry, the Australian Nurses and Midwifery Federation, the Health Services Union and United Voice, aged care workers have finally won the first step towards pay and working conditions that reflect their skills and the social value of their work.

Aged care workers – who are they? What do they experience?

There are approximately 250,000 aged care workers in Australia. 90% of the direct care workforce are women, most of whom are over 40 years of age. The majority are employed on a permanent part time basis.

Due to the growth of the sector, with an ageing population and the arduous nature of this low paid work, there is a labour shortage in the industry. The gap is being filled by new migrant labour, with 35% of total workforce in aged care now born overseas. These workers face additional problems as their employment has not been complemented with adequate training. They are expected to self-fund their own English as a second language skill development.

Aged care workers’ pay and conditions not only have to be won from their direct employer, but also the federal government which provides the funding for wages and salaries of workers in the industry. The federal government determines the conditions under which funding is provided to aged care industry providers.

Since the mid-1990s federal government funding to providers has been outcomes based. The major providers in the industry are a mixture of ‘not for profit’ religious based organisations like Anglicare and Uniting Church, small private providers, and increasingly, large multinational corporations like BUPA, Macquarie Bank and Archer Capital. Most of these organisations have all acted in a typical capitalist manner by using the funding to increase their profits or surpluses, rather than maximising care to residents.

Aged care workers have been the ‘meat in the sandwich’, battling to provide decent care with low wages, high workloads, frequent cuts to hours of work, casualisation, and even outsourcing of work. The outsourcing of work fills the pockets of labour hire nursing agencies, and in the support services area, multinationals like Compass and Spotless.

Aged Care Compact

However the determined struggle by aged care workers and their unions is starting to have a positive effect. This year the Minister for Aged Care announced a $1.2 billion funding package called the Aged Care Compact for the industry. The significance of the Compact is that all the money to aged care providers must be passed on to the workers in the form of wage increases.

The Compact means that aged care workers stuck on minimum award conditions will receive pay increases of a minimum of 17.5% over 4 years. This is not a huge increase, but substantially more than the likely pittance from National Wage Decisions for award increases which are likely to be around the 10-11% over the same period.

However, the real win for aged care workers is not just a wage increase. What they have won in the Compact is also a commitment from the federal government that no extra money will be made available to aged care providers unless they satisfy the following conditions;

• Negotiate a collective agreement with the aged care unions
• Include in the Agreement the following conditions of employment:

• Paid training of staff in skills and knowledge required for their job, especially in relation to residents with dementia
• Paid leave for union delegate training, representation leave
• Permanent employment for regular casuals employed for 6 months
• An agreed process in place to address workload issues of staff
• Requirement for providers to recognise that additional hours worked by staff on a regular basis must form part of their new minimum weekly hours.
• Requirement of the collective agreements to include a provision which gives workers the right to have a disciplinary matter referred to arbitration

This latter condition is causing a ‘revolt’ in employer provider ranks as it will put the brakes on their current practice of resolving complaints about staff from residents or their relatives by issuing countless warnings and often dismissals. This has disguised the very problems that elements of the Compact are designed to address – particularly poor staffing levels and onerous workloads.

As Vanguard goes to press, union leaders in the aged care facilities are building majority support among their co-workers to force providers to sign on to the Compact and reflect its intent in a collective union agreement. The employer providers on the other hand, are attempting to win changes to the Compact to maintain their ‘freedom’ to manage their workplace without ‘government interference’.

According to data collected by the federal government, the aged care providers made an average profit increase per subsidy aged care bed of 72% between 2009-11 and 2010-11. A good portion of this profit has been made by employer providers creaming off government funds to the industry, money which should have gone to more staffing and more working hours.

Aged care workers are determined to seize this small step forward and maximise the benefits of the Compact to bring their working conditions in to the 21 Century.