Australia: New South Wales public sector health workers reject Labor government wage cut

Australia: New South Wales public sector health workers reject Labor government wage cut

Public sector health workers in New South Wales (NSW), covered by the Health Services Union (HSU), recently voted down a state Labor government pay deal that would have slashed real wages.

Health Services Union members protest outside Westmead Hospital in Sydney on May 31, 2023

The offer, the same made to all public sector workers across the state, included a nominal pay increase of just 3.5 percent this year, with 3 percent rises to follow in 2025 and 2026. This can only accurately be described as a wage cut, with official inflation at 3.8 percent for the year ending in June.

Even this figure doesn’t reflect the real extent of the cost-of-living crisis. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show that living costs for “employee households” rose 6.2 percent over the past year, primarily fuelled by home mortgage payments and education costs.

The so-called “cost-of-living” relief in Labor’s offer—a $1,000 one-off payment—only applies if inflation exceeds 4.5 percent, virtually guaranteeing that wages will go backwards in each year of the deal.

The “no” vote by almost 5,000 HSU members indicates that health workers are ready to fight. But the words and actions of the HSU leadership, before, during and after the poll, as well as their record, demonstrate that the fight for real improvements to wages and conditions cannot be taken forward within the framework of the trade union apparatus.

  • The HSU bureaucracy presented the offer to workers without critical comment, effectively endorsing the Labor government’s attack on real wages.
  • No mass meetings were called to allow members to discuss the offer, meaning workers were left entirely on their own to decide.
  • The possibility of waging an industrial fight against the deal was not raised at all in writing before the ballot, and only in the vaguest terms in a social media video by HSU secretary Gerard Hayes.

The fact that only 9,500 workers took part in the poll—less than one-third of the HSU’s NSW public sector membership—is a product of the union leadership’s refusal to present workers with a program through which they can fight for an alternative to Labor’s austerity agenda.

An online HSU briefing last week to discuss the results of the ballot was attended by just a few dozen members, including several union delegates who were well known to the officials running the meeting. It is highly improbable that less than 0.5 percent of those who voted on the offer would be interested enough in the outcome to attend a Zoom meeting, but there is a simple explanation: Not all members received an invitation.

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