Humpty Dumpty inspires management at Mid Coast
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- Published: Wednesday, 31 May 2023 16:30
Everyone knows Humpty Dumpty. A book by Lewis Carroll published in 1872 and a nursery rhyme, but rarely adopted by management in local government as a role model.
But at Mid Coast, the ████████, the GM and ████████ expert have done precisely that - embraced Humphrey’s famous philosophy about the use of language:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master - that’s all”.
The three unions are involved in a long-running dispute with Mid Coast, not so much over what words do mean, but what they don’t. Everyone knows that the award requires councils to have a salary system, clause 7 Salary Systems of the Award has twelve subclauses about how it should operate and critically subclause (xii) provides that if a Council introduces a new salary system and you’ve got better progression and pay on your existing salary system, you can choose to remain on that.
That’s why ████████ think that if they can successfully argue that something which provides progression based on skills and performance is something qualitatively different to a salary system, then employees won’t have the protection of clause 7 (xii). This is a novel argument, the requirement to have salary systems at each Council is a compulsory obligation in the industry since 1992, but no one has been genius enough to try to disarm clause 7(xii) by arguing that the salary system they want to introduce, isn’t a salary system at all.
These are the same people who, after the issue was set down and a timetable established for arbitration, thought they could blithely go ahead and ignore the “status quo,’ tradition which is always protected in disputes and grievances on occasions like this, and start implementing what they want to do anyway, even though it’s going to be determined in November.
The LGEA dispute went back to the IRC and the geniuses learned an important lesson about what constitutes the status quo - it’s always the arrangements that existed prior to what the employer wants to do, or change, that caused the dispute.
This will run like a miserable weeping sore until it’s arbitrated in November - unless the ████████ starts taking advice from people who know what they’re doing.