December depaNews

Yes, that’s the time, only a handful of working days to the end of the year and we have some good news, plus the highly anticipated, and prestigious depa Award, for The Worst HR in Local Government.

The Committee of Management at their final meeting of the year on 7 November resolved that our membership fees won’t increase in 2025. One of the rewards from prudent financial management. The fees were last increased in 2023 and 2025 will be the third year at the current rates. 

Already the least expensive union in the industry, and becoming even more of a bargain when we do things like this and, we still provide almost instant responses to member requests.

Our fee will remain at $575 for full-time members, $290 for part-time members and $156 for trainees.

More members make it possible to keep our fees low, so it’s in everyone’s interest to sign-up a non-union member workmate (or two,) to make sure we can keep doing this.

The great mystery of this is why it would be a secret, or why people would lie about it in the first place. We covered this briefly in the August issue, there had been no consultation with staff about what they needed in their new workspaces even though an Acting Chief People Officer had rejected our requests for evidence of the consultation, asserting that “extensive consultation with staff from the inception of the project to completion” had taken place. That was a lie, and for our members there was no feedback at all about what was being proposed in the move to the new Administrative Centre.

The Council stone-walled, refusing our requests to explain why there hadn’t been consultation, and who had made the decisions - particularly on the ninth floor - to install what became known as “dining tables,” which some anonymous boofheads had decided would seat eight people. This is how the shared tables for eight were pictured:

This image was clearly not to scale. On-site the double computer screens were one continuous barrier from one end of the table to the other, the height of continuous screens meant you couldn’t see the other poor hapless colleagues on the other side of the table, there were issues about connectivity and cabling, the table legs were too monstrous to leave room for people to get their legs under the table and stretch out, people were effectively shoulder to shoulder.

Misleading at the very least, and a hoax at the worst, but these were the drawings upon which the Liverpool City Place Project Control Group made the decision to approve the floor plan on the ninth floor where compliance and members would be working. It was a farce.

In the end, the Acting CEO refused to respond at all, we lodged a GIPA application on 27 June seeking evidence from the Council about when this decision had been made and by whom. Our application was refined in discussions with the Council’s Access to Information Officer on 25 July and the process began.

Clearly the Access to Information Officer was having trouble finding evidence of decision-making but on 27 November, four months after our request was made, some heavily redacted documents were provided. The Council will now also make them available for public access.

Now we know that on 22 June 2023, the Liverpool City Place Project Control Group adopted the fit-out proposed by the developer subject only to funding from the Council. The group included the former CEO (the most recent of the 10 CEOs sacked by the Mayor over an eight year period), and all the directors or acting directors, including some who have said they had no choice at the meeting, although the minutes don’t note that!

The reaction of staff to the requirement to work under these unacceptable conditions prompted the Acting CEO to abandon all the shared desks and tables and provide individual seating/standing desks for everyone. We have no idea what happened to the furniture that had been installed to allow the replacement at some considerable, and undisclosed cost. All because they hadn’t consulted.

As a bonus for our persistence, because the Council couldn’t respond to the GIPA request by the required date under the legislation, depa is entitled to a refund of our $30 application fee!

It was never a big deal, we knew someone had to have decided it, but no one wanted to confess. No wonder there is a Public Enquiry into that Council to try to get to the bottom of how it really functions.

Section 353 of the Local Government Act 1993 regulates “other work”, as it is described in the Act. It is not described as “secondary employment” or anything else but it obliges employees to declare “other work” if it “relates to the business of the Council or that might conflict with the member’s council duties”. It does not make the council responsible for managing the obligations of employees in any way.

Simple really, but since 1993 there have been waves of councils misunderstanding the obligations imposed on employees and instead seizing the opportunity to require anyone doing any work at all, in addition to their Council job, to seek approval. This is wrong.

In a depa dispute with Sydney City at the time, the Department of Local Government supported our view that it was the employee’s responsibility and, in a letter dated 7 July 1974, under the signature of the Director General of the Department of Local Government Garry Payne, said this:

“While it is recognised that councils will develop employment practices which reflect their individual approach to staff matters, these policies should not be inconsistent with the Act"

Sydney’s policy was “inconsistent with the Act” and the dispute in the IRC was settled in our favour. Embarrassingly, decades later the City Council reintroduced the inconsistent policy, we filed another dispute and they reverted to the correct policy, but we are now discovering that 30 years after the Act was legislated, councils are reverting to policies which are “inconsistent with the Act”.

If your Council has a policy inconsistent with the Act, let us know and we will happily help them understand how it works. At the moment we are happily helping Randwick (where the GM instantly responded that the policy would be rewritten), Sutherland (where they are in the process of rewriting it), Georges River (which is, at a glacier-like pace, trying to respond to make their policy consistent with the Act), and Port Macquarie Hastings (who were initially reluctant but are also moving slowly towards consistency).

Something we can mop up in 2025.

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.)

The depa office will be closing at midday on Thursday 19 December and reopening on Monday 9 January. Mark Bayliss, our new Office Manager, will be returning to the office and will manage anything urgent. He will have access to members of the Committee and our legal team if you need help. And if everyone can behave themselves in the meantime, I’ll be back on Tuesday 28 January.

From the office and the Committee of Management, we wish you a joyful and festive Christmas, however you celebrate or spend the break, and an enthusiastic return to satisfying work, welcomed by refreshed and kind hearted managers and bosses, and councillors behaving themselves.