Shoalhaven dispute resolved but the Council suffers lasting damage

 

“I’ve had worse”, says Director Tim Fletcher

Well, who’d be surprised Shoalhaven would struggle to get suitably qualified applicants to fill the positions vacated by members of ours deciding to go to places where they are treated with more dignity and respect? Apart from management at Shoalhaven.

More of that next month when our highly regarded Golden Turd award is announced for 2014.

Our long-running dispute with Shoalhaven has now concluded. More than 10 days of compulsory conferences in the IRC, all of which reinforced the Council’s hostility to openness, transparency and fair treatment of its staff.

Shoalhaven featured in July 2014 as an early favourite in our HR Awards with a comprehensive listing of all the contested matters in this long-running dispute. At that stage we said we were ahead seven nil and the Council was failing to score at all.

The mystery and secrecy of the obsolete job evaluation system continued.  We had forced the Council to re-evaluate two team leader positions that they had originally proposed would be 3/2, so that they could laterally transfer two employees into the jobs without additional pay and without running the risk of redundancies and, sure enough, they had rorted the system, they were really 3/3. So, we wanted other jobs re-evaluated as well, so they opposed that vigourously and, when the Commission encouraged them to do so, they begrudgingly did so without disclosing the effect of the agreed changes, so no one would have any idea. Again, Commission encouraged them to do so. And they did. I’ve lost score by now. A zillion to nil?

But that wasn’t the end of it. They contested the vacating of dates that had been set by agreement, unsuccessfully of course consistent with everything else they had tried, and even contesting our request to vacate a date, set in our absence by the IRC. They lost that too.

We had two other positions finally re-evaluated but, while we were not able to move them into 3/3, at least the members concerned know they had a chance to have the positions evaluated with their own input rather than being pressed down by Director of Planning and Development Services Tim Fletcher and the flunkies from HR.

The dispute concludes with the Council having agreed to implement version 20 of the OOSoft job evaluation system in 2015. This is the system which superseded version 19 in 1998.