On Friday 2 June the Board of Local Government New South Wales will consider recommendations from their industrial relations staff to make a formal offer to the three unions for the 2017 Local Government State Award.
Only nine days to go...
In March we reported that the historic cooperation from LGNSW had disappeared. Something’s happened to the negotiators to restrain the cooperative approach to fixing those parts of the Award that we know need to be fixed and to keep the Award modern and relevant. Since that time we’ve continued to meet and had a succession of days of conciliation before Commissioner Murphy in the IRC to bring us together on those issues where we remained apart.
The Committee of Management considered a report at the last meeting on 15 May about Award clauses where “in principle” agreement had been reached between the negotiators which, with potential changes to the Workplace Change and Redundancy clause and a consensus on pay increases over the next three years, would form the basis of an offer subject to endorsement by the LGNSW Board.
At this stage, there is no offer and there is no agreement. There are more than 20 areas of the Award where the negotiators have reached a common view but there is nothing formal until the Board meets to formally resolve a position and then convey that as an offer to the unions.
We are hoping for the best.
Mind you, it doesn’t help when you sit down to negotiate pay increases to know that the CPI is running at 2.1%, that wages growth over the last 12 months is around 1.9% generally or 2.3% in the public sector. Still ...
There is still work being done to bring together agreed wording on clause 39 Workplace Change and redundancy and some other minor matters.
If the Board endorses the package of changes we are hoping for, a formal offer will be made late the following week to allow the unions time to consider it - or will have further conciliation if there are issues where we remain in dispute.
If agreement can be reached, the Commission has listed a hearing for the Award to be made on 30 June.
In depaNews in October last year we advised members of the facade that had been established by OLG and DPC under the guise of drawing on the expertise of the three unions and the employers in the industry giving advice to the Government on employment issues as the mergers rolled out.
It was, at that stage, facadism at its worst - masquerading as a transparent consultative mechanism when the reality was that we were getting more confidential information sent to us by people who shouldn’t do so and then we would distribute it to the Reference Group, wondering why we didn’t have it. That opened up access to more information than the Government had, up until that stage, been prepared to provide.
And our strategy of threatening the merged councils with industrial disputes for failing to disclose significant changes in their workforce because the Government wouldn’t allow them to provide details of cost-cutting measures they were being forced to make and to keep confidential unlocked more critical information.
So we made the Employment Matters Reference Group a more useful, transparent and consultative body than the government originally intended.
But the Reference Group require that the deliberations of the group be not disclosed and sometimes being gagged, in the context of industrial disputes when that information would be critical, is an unacceptable restriction. Particularly in an unpleasant and drawn out battle with Georges River and their belligerent position on section 354D.
So, it’s our history now that OLG has reminded councils that the protection under section 354 D of the Local Government Act is indefinite and not restricted to the three years as the boofheads at Georges River, in particular, were insisting.
But how the matter was raised by us in the IRC in the dispute has become a problem. So, having made them construct a more transparent and open consultative group, we’ve pulled the pin.
First it was the Court of Appeal finding for Ku-ring-gai in their challenge to the Government’s attempt to merge that Council with most of Hornsby. When we say “most of Hornsby”, that was something the smart people in government missed because the fundamental reason why the Court of Appeal found for Ku-ring-gai was the section of the Local Government Act under which they had acted to merge all of Ku-ring-gai and most of Hornsby, relied upon merging “two local government areas”. And the Court found they didn’t have two local government areas, they had one local government area and another local government area with part of it “excised”. Do’h! A dumb mistake.
And persuasive as well was the Government’s insistence that the KPMG report, containing what the Government and their delegates claimed was compelling financial evidence of efficiencies and cost savings, be a confidential document. What is this Government and its obsession with confidentiality? If you’ve got nothing to hide, you don’t need confidentiality.
And then the High Court has decided to provide leave to appeal to Woollahra to contest the Government’s proposal to force the amalgamation of Woollahra with Randwick and Waverley. Again, based significantly on the government’s obsession to keep the KPMG report confidential. And Randwick now looks like joining in - despite Randwick and Waverley for years having happily embraced each other with a view to voluntary merger if they needed to.
