Vanguard

Friday, April 26, 2013

Murray Bridge hosts dairy farmer protest

Vanguard May 2013 p. 5
Nick G.

Over 300 dairy farmers and their supporters took to the streets of Murray Bridge on March 27 to protest at the supermarket duopolies and their milk pricing policies.

They demanded higher milk prices, government assistance and increased market regulation.

The march was led by a young boy wearing a sandwich board saying “I just want to be a dairy farmer”.

The sentiment captured the feeling of hopelessness that has descended on many dairy farming families squeezed to the point of bankruptcy by Coles and Woolworths.

Wellington farmer Melanie Walsh hit the nail on the head: “No one wants to buy our land; our cows are worth diddley-squat, next to nothing; we can’t get out; we’ve got nothing.”

Farmers complained that the difference between the high cost of producing milk and the low price paid for it was on average around 5 cents per litre.

With an average farm producing 2 million litres annually that price difference constitutes a loss of $100,000.

One farmer, who took two cows to the protest, had a placard that had supermarket profits, bank profits and processor profits all with an upward pointing arrow, and dairy farmer profits with a downward pointing arrow.

Nor is it just dairy farmers who are being punished by the duopoly. Milking machine technicians and refrigerator technicians face job losses as the number of dairy farmers declines.

Several years ago Fair Work Australia gave dairy farmers the right to collectively bargain.

The duopoly are trying to undermine dairy farmers’ unity by by-passing processors and promising to buy directly from the producers at a “higher price”.

This plays into the hands of the bigger farmers and leaves the majority out in the cold. The duopoly will not want to chase up milk supplies from a myriad of smaller farmers if they can get what they want from several large producers.

Shadow Agriculture Minister John Cobb won few friends at a meeting of the farmers when he ruled out regulations for the protection of the industry.

The local Murray Valley Standard pointed out in an editorial that farmers are “dreaming if they think a Coalition Government will do anything to re-regulate Australia’s dairy industry.”

“Where do you find a solution,” it asked, “when the major political parties adopt economic policies that are hopelessly at odds with the current demands of farmers?”

Leaving that question unanswered, as did the Standard editor, merely reinforces the feelings of helplessness.

Dairy farmers need to keep the initiative in their own hands, develop their unity at a local and national level, and raise the level of struggle through direct confrontation with and pressure on the Coles-Woolworths duopoly.

They are right to insist on re-regulation and government support but must pressure the politicians and not rely on them and their parliamentary processes.

Connecting with the broader movement for community and workplace rights will strengthen the dairy farmers as other sections of the community welcome their demands into the independent agenda for change in this country.

...................
Further reading:

http://www.farmerpower.com.au/

Media reports:

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/south-australia/dairy-industry-marches-over-crisis/story-e6frea83-1226607576541

http://straightfurrow.farmonline.co.nz/news/state/cattle/dairy/dairyfarmers-march-for-milk/2652336.aspx

http://adf.farmonline.com.au/news/magazine/industry-news/general/march-for-milk/2652479.aspx

Horticulture industry crisis

Vanguard May 2013
Duncan B.

It is not only the dairy industry that is in crisis, Australia’s horticultural industry is also in trouble.

Since 2009, more than 1230 horticulture processing jobs have been lost along Australia’s east coast. Eleven fruit and vegetable processors have closed. Hundreds of tonnes of fruit and vegetables have been dumped or left to waste.

In March, Australia’s last major canning company, Windsor Foods went into voluntary administration, with millions of dollars worth of debt. 80 workers have lost their jobs and farmers contracted to grow vegetables for the company will not get paid. This follows on from the recent closure of the Rosella plant in Sydney, which cost 100 jobs.

The high Australian dollar and the extensive use by supermarkets of foreign produce in their home brand lines have contributed to the decline of Australian horticulture.

Figures compiled by KPMG and the Australian Food and Grocery Council revealed that Australia’s net trade surplus of food and groceries crashed from $4.5 billion in 2004-5 to a deficit of $2.7 billion in 2110-11.

Dairy industry developments

In the latest development in the dairy industry, Woolworths plans to obtain milk directly from groups of dairy farmers, by-passing the milk processors who normally deal with the farmers.

Under the Woolworths plan, processors would not buy the product, process it and sell it to the supermarkets as is presently the case. Instead, processors would be paid a fee for processing the product. It remains to be seen what the effects of this scheme will have on milk processing companies.

Processors are already feeling the pinch as a result of the strong competition in the dairy industry. New Zealand-based processor Fonterra’s Australian operations copped a 32% fall in earnings for the first half of the financial year. The company has announced plans to cut consumer brands and jobs in Australia.

US farmland sales

Across America, farmers are receiving record prices for their land as big banks, finance firms and equity funds are snapping up farmland. These firms are buying farmland and then renting it out to farmers in the hope of getting high rents. One fund now owns 600 farms.

American farm debt rose by nearly 30% since 2007, and is expected to be US$277.4 billion this year. This figure is likely to be understated as it does not include finance from specialised finance firms or suppliers such as Monsanto and John Deere. Many farmers are taking advantage of the high prices being offered for land to cash in while they can.

Punishment and coercion characterise the bourgeoisie's attitude towards the poor

Vanguard May 2013 p.6
Nick G.

It seems to be in the very genes of the rich that they can only rationalise the existence of the poor in terms of some fault or shortcoming in the latter.

And because it is the fault of the poor that they are poor, punishment and coercion are required in dealing with them.

Bloody legislation against the expropriated

Marx wrote a fascinating account of such punishment and coercion in Chapter 28 of the first volume of Capital.

“The fathers of the present working class,” he said of people who had been forcibly thrown off the land at the end of the 15^th and during the whole of the 16^th centuries, “were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.”

He reports how, during the reign of Henry VIII, a law in 1530 provided that those who had no work due to age or incapacity should be issued with a beggar’s licence. Those who were able-bodied but unable to find work were damned as vagabonds and “tied to the cart-tail and whipped until the blood streams from their bodies”. A further piece of legislation condemned them to a repeat whipping and the slicing off of half the ear if they were caught idle a second time, and for a third offence, executed as a hardened criminal.

His successor, Edward VI, ruled in 1547 that “if anyone refuses to work, he shall be condemned as a slave to the person who has denounced him as an idler.”

“The master shall feed his slave on bread and water, weak broth and such refuse meat as he thinks fit. He has the right to force him to do any work, no matter how disgusting, with whip and chains. If the slave is absent a fortnight, he is condemned to slavery for life and is to be branded on forehead or back with the letter S; if he runs away thrice, he is to be executed as a felon.

“The master can sell him, bequeath him, let him out on hire as a slave, just as any other personal chattel or cattle. If the slaves attempt anything against the masters, they are also to be executed. Justices of the peace, on information, are to hunt the rascals down. If it happens that a vagabond has been idling about for three days, he is to be taken to his birthplace, branded with a red-hot iron with the letter V on the breast and be set to work, in chains, in the streets or at some other labour.

“If the vagabond gives a false birthplace, he is then to become the slave for life of this place, of its inhabitants, or its corporation, and to be branded with an S. All persons have the right to take away the children of the vagabonds and to keep them as apprentices, the young men until the 24th year, the girls until the 20th. If they run away, they are to become up to this age the slaves of their masters, who can put them in irons, whip them, &c., if they like. Every master may put an iron ring round the neck, arms or legs of his slave, by which to know him more easily and to be more certain of him.”

Workhouses – “Poor Law Bastilles”

By the end of the 18^th century the poor were being herded into Workhouses where they were put to work for 12 hours a day winding yarn and other dirty tasks. Parish relief was provided to some as an act of charity, but the numbers of the poor soon exhausted this source of assistance.

(Above: women in a workhouse unpicking old rope and cordage to produce oakum, used for caulking or packing the timbers of wooden vessels. Inmates could be punished for producing less than two pounds of oakum per day)

Writing in 1845, in his Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels reported how: “They accordingly brought in the New Poor Law, which was passed by Parliament in 1834, and continues in force down to the present day. All relief in money and provisions was abolished; the only relief allowed was admission to the workhouses immediately built. The regulations for these workhouses, or, as the people call them, Poor Law Bastilles, is such as to frighten away everyone who has the slightest prospect of life without this form of public charity.

“To make sure that relief be applied for only in the most extreme cases and after every other effort had failed, the workhouse has been made the most repulsive residence which the refined ingenuity of a Malthusian can invent. The food is worse than that of the most ill-paid working-man while employed, and the work harder, or they might prefer the workhouse to their wretched existence outside.

“Meat, especially fresh meat, is rarely furnished, chiefly potatoes, the worst possible bread and oatmeal porridge, little or no beer. The food of criminal prisoners is better, as a rule, so that the paupers frequently commit some offence for the purpose of getting into jail. For the workhouse is a jail too; he who does not finish his task gets nothing to eat; he who wishes to go out must ask permission, which is granted or not, according to his behaviour or the inspectors whim; tobacco is forbidden, also the receipt of gifts from relatives or friends outside the house; the paupers wear a workhouse uniform, and are handed over, helpless and without redress, to the caprice of the inspectors.

“To prevent their labour from competing with that of outside concerns, they are set to rather useless tasks: the men break stones, “as much as a strong man can accomplish with effort in a day”; the women, children, and aged men pick oakum, for I know not what insignificant use. To prevent the “superfluous” from multiplying, and “demoralised” parents from influencing their children, families are broken up; the husband is placed in one wing, the wife in another, the children in a third, and they are permitted to see one another only at stated times after long intervals, and then only when they have, in the opinion of the officials, behaved well. And in order to shut off the external world from contamination by pauperism within these bastilles, the inmates are permitted to receive visits only with the consent of the officials, and in the reception-rooms; to communicate in general with the world outside only by leave and under supervision. “

Bosses never reconciled to workers’ win on welfare rights

The Poor Laws and associated Workhouse punishments remained in force until after World War 2 when the working class was strong enough to demand their replacement with welfare payments.

However, the attitude of the bourgeoisie towards the poor whom their system creates remains one based on notions of punishment and coercion.

When a few misguided individuals took up Timothy Leary’s 1967 call to “drop out”, often at tax-payer expense, the bourgeoisie found a new gold-mine of ideological abuse to hurl at the genuinely unemployed. The Bulletin raised the flag of battle in 1976 with its use of the term “dole bludger”, which is never very far from the lips of those fortunate enough to never require the dole.

Compulsory income management

The demonising of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through the racist NT intervention introduced compulsory income management (CIM) as a coercive measure. Implicit in this was the belief that ATSI people were to blame for the oppressive conditions that exist in many of their communities, that is, that they were underserving and squandered the benefits they were paid. Great things were promised of CIM in the NT, and it has now been rolled out in “trials” in five low SES urban communities, the APY Lands in SA, and in parts of the Pilbara in WA. This is despite various studies that have said that in the NT it was a disempowering control measure and that there was little evidence it was helping people.

Attacks on single parents

The same attitude is behind Gillard’s decision to move nearly 80,000 single parents from their insufficient Parenting Payment to the criminally low Newstart Allowance. This represents a loss of around $100 per week to families in poverty, most of them headed by women.

On numerous occasions, Gillard has described this reactionary measure as one designed to “provide an incentive to bring people back into the workforce”. Others have described it as “designed to coerce”.

Following a complaint about this reactionary measure by the Australian Council of Social Services, the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and Chair-Rapporteur of the Working Group on the issue of discrimination against women in law and practice wrote on 19 October 2012 to the Australian Government seeking an explanation of a decision it described as “threatening the enjoyment of human rights of some of the most marginalized and impoverished members of Australian society”.

Through centuries of struggle, the working class has forced the ruling class to modify and amend some of its vilest anti-poor practices, but measures like CIM and putting single parents onto Newstart illustrate that the ideological core of their contempt for the poor remains.

Barbara Shaw from the Mt Nancy town camp near Alice Springs has not been branded on the forehead, but she, and many ATSI people like her, feel the stigma of identification and branding by having to carry and use the
BasicsCard of CIM.

The bourgeoisie, the class that rules capitalist society, will always push down on the working poor and the unemployed.

It really is in their genes

………………

Good riddance to Maggie Thatcher!

Vanguard May 2013 p. 7
Nick G.

The news of the death of Maggie Thatcher has been greeted with rejoicing in working class communities throughout Britain. Street parties have been held by large crowds of celebrating people.

The capitalist press and bourgeois politicians have described this as “disrespectful”.

We agree. Disrespect for those who attack the people, who make their lives a misery is powerful, positive and unifying. Let there be more of it.

(Above: Members of the public celebrate Thatcher's death in Glasgow's George Square)

Thatcher was the embodiment of the ruthlessness, vindictiveness and arrogance of the ruling class.

With her US counterpart, the idiot President Ronald Reagan, she imposed neoliberalism on the world. Every demand of finance capital for the unregulated plunder of the value created by working people was met.

We should remember the misery and heartache that she foisted on ordinary people across Great Britain and Argentina.

We should remember the communities devastated across Britain by her attack on miners and the Miners Union, their families and their communities.

We should remember the families and communities that were the victims of her support for Rupert Murdoch in his destruction of the Times Newspaper and his attack on the printing unions.

We should remember those lost and killed in the Falklands/Malvinas war, manufactured to get her re-elected in late 1982.

We should remember her cheering at the sinking of the Belgrano with 320 people killed.

We should remember her economic policies embraced not only by conservative politicians but also by Labor leaders like Hawke, Keating, Tony Blair and others.

Her legacy should always be recorded as one of division, destruction, misery and heartache.

Remember the victims of her rule and bid her good riddance.

Class warfare rhetoric

Vanguard May 2013 p. 7
Dennis M.

As the parliamentary cretins tore the ALP apart, its sad and sorry losers huffed and puffed against ‘class-warfare rhetoric’.

In truth, we haven’t heard even the rhetoric of class struggle. Treasury mouthpiece Swan let off a few farts about mining company rip-offs. Free-trade Emerson blessed the little cotton socks of the fabulously wealthy.

One of richest people in the world, US investor Warren Buffett, knows one big thing about class struggle. That something is what all shades of parliamentary cretins don’t want us to hear. ‘There is a class war’, Buffett says, ‘and my class is winning.’

If you want to hear the voice of class warfare try Rinehart’s two-dollars-a-day wage for size. Her dream is more than rhetoric. What she is after is the substance of class warfare. What is that substance?

The class struggle is much more than lockouts or picket lines. Indeed, the class struggle is waged every second of everyday. Its crux is the disciplining of labour-time. The weapons of capital include time-and-motion, speed-ups and unpaid overtime. Others are piece-rates and casualisation. Weak occupational health and safety helps the managers to keep profits flowing.

This regime became possible because the propertied classes used force and robbery to get their claws on the means of production. They did so with the backing of the state as legalised violence.

The outcome set labour ‘free’ in three senses. We are ‘freed’ from possessing all but one of the resources we need to sustain ourselves. That remaining resource is our capacity to add value. Secondly, we are ‘free’ to sell that resource to capital. Finally, we are free to starve when capital has no need for our labour-power. Look at the suicide rates in Greece and Spain!

(Above: Grocon workers united in the fight against their employer)
The class struggle over wages and hours also dominates life outside our places of work. That battle decides how much leisure we have and the quality of our sleep. The substance of class warfare determines the quality of the food we put on our tables. It also determines the cost of housing, its availability and standard. It decides our access to education. Does schooling contribute to the all-round development of our children as human beings? Or are they stunted to training for the boss class?

Under the rules of class war, the state organises capital and disorganises labour. Often as not, the state tries to disorganise labour by re-organising it.

That is what happened under the arbitration regime. Then, the 1969 O’Shea strike sidelined the penal powers. In response, Fraser turned to the Trade Practices Act. The Accords were the big de-form under Hawke-Keating to disorganise us. Today, the boss class is using tort laws to bankrupt unions, as in the Grocon dispute.

In these assaults, capital is backed by its labour lieutenants from Rudd to Gillard. We feel their dirty work through un-FairWork Australia and her enforcement of the Building and Construction Commission.

Wages and conditions are determined by the relative strengths of the contending classes. Those strengths combine the industrial, the economic, the political and the cultural. Even for defence, our class has to organise at all those levels.

Workers might not always call the class struggle for what it is. To score more wins, we don’t need the wind-baggery of a Swan.

One task for communists is to link wages, hours, conditions and OH&S with needs across the rest of life. We join demands for public transport, a healthy environment, a progressive culture and an end to war-mongering. These issues combine to confront capital and its state with needs they cannot meet. They are the substance of class warfare.

Capitalist class squeals about 'class war' over Labor's tinkering with superannuation

Vanguard May 2013 p. 8
Max O.

(Above: a whole industry of financial advisors and consultants helps to preserve the privileges of the rich and super rich)

The Gillard government's plan to roll back some of the multi-billion dollar superannuation tax concessions from high income earners has sparked off predictable outrage from the financial and superannuation institutions, reactionary opposition political parties and opportunists within the parliamentary Labor party. Previous Labor ministers, Simon Crean, Joel Fitzgibbon and Martin Ferguson openly align themselves with the Murdoch press and Abbot's Coalition parties to warn Treasurer Swan of the danger of "class warfare" and not to increase taxes on superannuation investment earnings of the "fabulously wealthy".

Crean argued this would be, “tantamount to taxing people’s retirement surpluses to fund our surplus” and “The Labor Party has always operated most effectively when it has been inclusive, when it’s sought consensus, not when it has sought division, not when it has gone after class warfare.” Fitzgibbon declared that those earning $250,000 a year (the top 3 percent of households) were “struggling” and should not be stripped of any tax concessions. Ferguson said “the class war rhetoric that started the mining dispute of 2010 must cease." With enemies like these, the working class knows the Labor party is not much of a friend!

Opposition leader Tony Abbott backed up the Labor opportunists Crean's, Fitzgibbon's and Ferguson's position and argued that Gillard was playing the "politics of envy" and "class warfare" by seeking to take away the superannuation tax concessions from the top richest, 0.7% of the population.

The real purpose of superannuation

When compulsory superannuation was introduced by the Keating Labor government back in the early 1990s its purpose wasn't altruistic at all. The Labor party embraced the economics of neo-liberalism, where governments now withdrew from their social responsibility to provide pensions for retired citizens from government coffers. It aimed to replace the age pension by individuals themselves providing their own retirement incomes through superannuation savings.

The intention of privatising workers’ retirement savings was to offer financial institutions an enormous fund of ever-increasing capital to invest. Superannuation funds have been largely tied to the stock market, where they play a substantial role in the formation of capital investment in Australia and overseas. Currently, superannuation funds are being encouraged to buy up government utilities and so assist the march of privatisation.

Finally, the wind back of age pension costs would fund future tax cuts for the rich and the private sector e.g. mining companies, banks and insurance companies.

Consequently these superannuation institutions, with around $1.5 trillion, wield enormous power in the game of capital accumulation. Retired workers' interests are incidental to the main show of corporate greed. This is especially the case when stock-market and derivative crashes cause the superannuation earnings of retirees to fall dramatically!

Gillard pretends to be the workers' friend

Ostensibly Gillard was wanting to collect revenue to fund schemes such as the National Disability Insurance and the Gonski School Funding Reforms through changing tax breaks for superannuation contributions from the filthy rich. After the debacle of the Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) where only 1% of the planned revenue was actually collected, the Federal Labor government scrambled around for another source of revenue collection to convince working people they govern in their interests.

The government initially signalled the option of changing the super earnings tax rate for the “fabulously wealthy”, thought to be the top 1% or 2%. Frightened by the reaction of the super industry, who threatened a campaign like the mining and gambling industries against the changes, the Gillard government (as typical class cowards) backed off. Tread on superannuation industry's toes at your peril for it’s a very profitable business. This industry reaps $20 billion a year alone in administration fees from fund members as well as the profiteering that is gained through the management of large sums of money and the manipulation of stock markets, derivatives etc.

Consequently the Government announced that from July 2014, earnings (from the pension stage) of more than $100,000 on superannuation pensions and annuities will be taxed at 15% instead of being tax free. It expects the change will apply to those with more than $2 million in superannuation assets, around 16,000 people. It is expected to raise about $900 million over the next four years and $10 billion over the coming decade.

This is a highly dubious forecast (as pointed out by the reactionary economist Judith Sloan) given the capacity of the filthy rich to reduce their tax by moving around their money to other forms of low tax investments. The Labor Party takes great pride in being the creators of compulsory superannuation and wears it as a badge of honour. However the filthy rich take even greater pride in manipulating the superannuation scheme to carry out tax avoidance! Anyway it will not raise enough revenue for all the present and future funding tasks; and will only affect a small percentage of the filthy rich.

The unfair regressive, flat superannuation tax of 15% on contributions, regardless how much an individual’s income is, has been kept at the accumulation stage. Here is where the Labor government could've introduced a progressive tax on superannuation contributions, where higher incomes pay progressively higher taxes.

It is estimated that superannuation tax concessions amount to $31 billion a year, a similar figure that the federal government spends each year on the aged pension. Interesting statistics from the Australian Council of Social Services show that 17 percent of the tax concessions on super contributions went to the wealthiest 5 percent, while nearly half, 47 percent, went to the wealthiest 12 percent.

Unfortunately Gillard's spineless tinkering with the superannuation contributions of the filthy rich is just a publicity stunt, much like her visit to Western Sydney to do something about the 457 visa rorts. For the new superannuation measure will not be legislated before the September elections, so they are unlikely to be realized with the predicted election of the Liberal-National coalition parties.

Capital's class warfare offensive vs working class struggle

As much as reactionary politicians scream about class warfare when the interests of the rich might be encroached upon, it is really the filthy rich who are actively on the alert to carry out class battles against the working class. Witness their attacks on the very mild Super Profits Mining Tax, their campaign for the exploitative 457 visa temporary foreign work scheme (Gina Rinehart's dream of paying 2 dollar a day for workers is getting closer to reality) and now the hysteria over the superannuation tax on the rich.

The Gillard Labor government's dismal attempts to gather revenue to fund the big ticket National Disability Insurance and the Gonski School Funding schemes is not genuine. It is just for electoral show. The Labor government, true to form, will twist and turn then carry out the orders of Capital when it growls.

The parliamentary Labor party is widely seen as morally and ideologically bankrupt and consequently being abandoned by the Australian working class. The union and labour movement needs to differentiate itself from the Labor Party and start the task of developing an independent working class agenda. The working class and its allies, such as small farmers and small businesses, don't see the major parties as representing their interests. Now is the time for the labour movement to independently mobilise the working class to face the next onslaught of class attacks from Capital.

It is only through class struggle that the working class ever achieved anything.

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.