MyState has announced they will put their offer to another vote of all MyState employees. This offer does not have the support of our union or your bargaining representatives.
Unfortunately, the offer:
- does not provide an overall improvement to our working conditions
- fails to address our key workplace concerns
- sells out entitlements for new employees (creating a future risk for everyone).
After we overwhelmingly rejected the last offer in June, management’s approach to negotiations has been appalling, with delay tactics and no effort to achieve real progress.
MyState management:
- delayed the restart of negotiations by two months
- have ignored claims and discussions prior to the ‘no’ vote
- have made claims about their limited ‘bucket of money’ but have failed to provide any data to back up their claims
- have ignored the ‘non-cost’ items we suggested (which are already contained in policy)
- initially tabled an aggressive offer to cut long service leave, redundancy leave, personal leave, expand hours of work, and enforce a four-day per week in-office attendance requirement.
Worst of all – not once have they demonstrated they value or care for their employees by improving conditions at work.
Compared to the last offer, MyState’s current proposal:
- does not provide backdated wage increases, which had previously been offered (that’s despite management delaying negotiations by two months after we voted no and tabling an aggressive agenda of cuts).
- provides a further 3% pay increase over three years (totalling 12%) for bands A, B and C – but at the cost of Company Performance Bonuses and cuts to long service leave and redundancy for new employees.
- provides bands D and E with only an additional 1% pay increase, totalling 10% over three years (much of this ‘increase’ has been taken away by their refusal to backdate pay increases).
- does nothing for Auswide staff, who lost four wellness days per year and overtime payments for part-timers (when these were removed, Auswide staff were told they would have an opportunity to negotiate conditions as part of the Enterprise Agreement).
- does nothing to protect working from home/remote working arrangements (MyState even proposed a requirement to get staff back in the office four days a week).
- does nothing to attract new staff to MyState by addressing workloads and staffing issues.
- risks our future entitlements – cutting redundancy and long service leave for new staff is a risk to current staff too. Already, MyState has reduced redundancy pay from 52 weeks capped to 40 weeks.
And now MyState is trying to force this offer through by pushing us to another vote.
We will have further communications in the coming days once the ballot dates are known, including a complete summary of the changes proposed and what happens this time after another No vote.
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