It’s an extraordinary thing to see the typically gentle people who work in aged care banging drums on the street and howling outside a building. But the chants of “Blue Care, Be Fair” at a rally in Brisbane last week was the latest outpouring of growing anger at the poor conditions offered to workers in Australia’s aged care sector.
The immediate issue is a new enterprise agreement put to Queensland’s aged care workers by providers Blue Care and Wesley Mission, both of which are agencies of the Uniting Church.
Most of the workers banging drums in Brisbane had never taken industrial action before, but someone like Deborah, who I met at the demonstration, felt she had little choice. She explained to me that under the agreement her employer was seeking, she could be compelled to work up to three single-hour shifts in a day – with no travel time or fuel costs covered by the company.
She was joined in the crowd by Natalie – not a worker, but the daughter-in-law of a woman in care. Natalie, told me she felt obliged to defend the workers who shared the care of her loved one, and to whom she’d become close. She had concerns of just what kind of quality care was likely for families if care workers themselves are exploited, underpaid and overburderned.
Unions met with Blue Care on Tuesday. The charity has “backed down” and are now offering conditions where workers can be called in for two two-hour shifts a day – but, again, with no travel allowance, with hours extending until 8 o’clock at night, and with the removal of a casual loading for the second shift that they currently receive.
Damien Davie, the United Voice union representative fighting the agreement, told me that the majority of workers working double shifts rarely go home between them, because they can’t afford the travel costs to do so. Instead, they hang around, and often just keep working.
The confrontation with Blue Care affects 4,500 local workers but it would be optimistic to consider it unique situation. There are 30,000 aged care workers in Queensland alone and as the population ages, the national number is expanding all the time. Davie tells me that “slashing of conditions”, wage reductions, outsourcing and “a raft of job security measures” that Blue Care is trying to dispense with in the new agreement are typical of trends across an industry that is already shockingly underpaid.
“Wages in aged care are horrendous,” Davie says of what is exhausting physical labour, “as little as $20 an hour, and that’s for showering, feeding and assisting with the care of the elderly.”
And it goes without saying that the majority of aged care workers are women; up to 80% of the workforce, United Voice estimates. Like the ongoing campaign to properly remunerate early-childhood educators – a large group of whom joined their aged-care colleagues in Brisbane as an act of solidarity – what’s happening in aged care is an illuminating indictment of the both the devaluation of care work and a gendered differential applied to the value of labour.
“You’d expect a church organisation like the Uniting Church to be different,” says Davie. It isn’t.
So it’s no wonder Queenslanders are fighting – Davie tells me that that the outsourcing of services like cleaning and catering by similar providers in New South Wales has resulted in pay as little as $15 an hour. That’s less than a retailer would pay a Christmas casual.
That it’s Christmas, too, is an event with significance not lost on the protestors in Queensland. “Uniting Care are running the Christmas Appeal at Target this year, but they want to plunge some of their employees into poverty by reducing shift times, contracting out their jobs and lowering wages,” says Davie.
I wrote to Blue Care asking how they justified their demand to deploy workers on the split two-hour shifts with no loading or travel allowances, and as to why they are seeking to outsource some services, knowing this will drive down wages. Their spokesperson did not answer these questions, assuring me instead that the organisation “recognises staff are at the heart of all Blue Care services”, pledging to work with unions for “best outcomes” and letting me know their staff are among “some of the highest paid” in the aged care sector, “some classifications, up to 50% higher” than the modern award.
The union claims “above award” payments amount to $20.58 an hour. The spokesperson didn’t answer my question about outsourcing driving down wages.
United Voice says the usual claim made by the services is that squeezing workers is merely a response to a legislative environment that prefers “consumer directed care”. Such a claim “doesn’t wash” with the union, which points out that the funding big charity receives for aged care is overwhelmingly from the government, provided with the intent to meet a collective social responsibility to care for the elderly.
Howard-era deregulation of aged care funding allowed the sector to largely self-regulate – and the church-run charity sector to redirect profits from these services back into their other activities. With an explosion in for-profit aged care providers, charity providers have also adopted a corporate culture.
“As not-for-profit organisations, they get tax free status in the community because they’re supposed to exist for the public good,” says Davie. “But it’s been so corporatised, they themselves refer to it as a business.”
With working families relying more and more on external care services to adequately support ageing parents and other family members, attacks on pay and conditions, high staff turnover and understandably poor morale seriously compromise quality care. Says Davie: “The aged care industry already has 25% turnover – more insecure jobs with less wages is going to create greater turnover – and that’s not good for care recipients.”
This family pressure explains the presence of people like Natalie at the Brisbane demonstration, but it’s a consideration of the broader movement for workplace fairness, too.
“Aged care is an area that multinationals are eyeing off because they can see big opportunities for profits with the ageing population,” says Dave Oliver, the secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. “They’ll maximise their profits by compromising support and cutting wages. Our priority should be the quality of support we give to older Australians, not the size of the dividend we give to corporations.”
The consequences of this corporatised care culture should be of concern to all Australians. Says Oliver: “My dear old dad who passed away this year – the nursing home who had him there, the care from the staff – it was terrific. They looked after him.”
His voice strikes a rare note of softness and he adds: “I’d hate to ever see that level of compassionate care be diminished.”
