Frontline health workers in Queensland have been denied a promised pay increase because they agreed to prioritise coronavirus preparations ahead of finalising an industrial agreement, their union says.
Last week, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, blindsided the union movement and announced during a television interview that agreed public sector pay increases were “on hold” amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Alex Scott, the secretary of the Together union that represents much of the state’s public service, said frontline health professionals had trusted the government not to “rat on the deal” for better pay, agreed in principle last year.
The deal would have given hospital workers in Queensland – excluding doctors and nurses, who have a separate agreement – their first pay increase in two years.
“They know they’ll be putting their lives at risk every day (during the pandemic) and they are not going to do anything that will compromise their ability to help, which is why they’re so disappointed and angry,” Scott said.
The union says the process for certifying a pay deal for health workers should have concluded before now. But that process was delayed because the state health department, the union and workers all agreed that potentially life-saving preparations for the health system to cope with the impact of the coronavirus should take absolute priority.
“Apart from flattening the curve, the other thing we need to do is increase health capacity to meet the pandemic … essentially retooling the whole health system,” Scott said.
“That has meant that up until now we’ve de-prioritised the process around the certification of the agreement and prioritised what is urgent to need to save lives.
“(The process to certify the agreement) had not been prioritised by the agency because they were dealing with buying new testing machines, the supply chain, personal protective equipment and so on. We’re very keen to make sure there’s enough PPE.
“Given the nature of the pandemic, they only had so much to get done within the timeframe and from a policy point of view we thought that was the right thing for government to do as long as they didn’t rat on the deal with the public sector workforce to give them a pay increase.”
Queensland government sources say many Labor MPs were unaware that Palaszczuk would announce the pay freeze last Thursday. She made the comment on morning television when asked about an opinion column on the issue in the Courier-Mail.
One state Labor MP said he thought the decision could have been discussed or negotiated with unions before being announced “rather than falling into this pattern that seems to be emerging of jumping quickly to avert outrage from News Corp”.
“What is telling for me is that the unions didn’t know,” the MP said. “If this was anything other than a knee-jerk to criticism then you can guarantee we’d have sat the unions down first and explained the situation, even asked for their help.”
Palaszczuk’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
Scott said the union was conscious of broader economic pressures on the state budget, but was still waiting to discuss the matter and objected to the process of “negotiation by press release”. He would not rule out some form of industrial action as a “last resort” but said workers would not take any action that affected the health response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“Our preference would be to talk it through and come up with a solution through a clear and transparent process,” Scott said.
“If we can’t get that clarity we’ll look at our options at that stage. Health workers are going to be putting their own lives at risk ... whatever we do we’ll be putting the Queensland community first.
“The pandemic hasn’t hit yet and we want to be making sure we can get these issues resolved so we can continue to have a laser focus rather than being distracted by industrial problems or the economic problems that our workers are going to face because they haven’t had the conditions they were guaranteed last year. These are low-paid workers, a lot of their partners have lost their jobs and they need the back pay.”
The Greens MP Michael Berkman said Labor had been taking policy advice from the former premier Campbell Newman, who had been calling for the pay freeze, and the Courier-Mail.
“It’s a slap in the face for the heroes fighting this pandemic on the front line to learn that they’re getting a real wage cut while the premier’s own staff have already received their backpay,” Berkman said.
“They’re going after public servants, including hospital cleaners, porters, catering staff and the call centre workers on the Covid-19 response line, because they’re too afraid to go after the mining companies and big corporations who are still not paying their fair share.”
