June 15, 2021

Unions

“Your action  is inspirational and we stand in solidarity with you”: a letter of support from QNMU

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Beth Mohle, Secretary of the Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union, sends her support to NSW nurses and midwives fighting for patient safety.

Dear NSWNMA members,

We have been closely watching your current industrial action over safe workloads in the public sector and send you our support and solidarity from Queensland.

The recent  industrial action taken is very significant. It took great courage to take this action, but it is driven by passion and commitment and an over-riding concern for patient and staff safety.

As we know, nurses and midwives never take industrial action lightly. But so many are now tipped over the edge, exhausted from the unrelenting workload demands and fed up with being disrespected and taken for granted.

Your number one priority is the safety of both the people that you care for and your colleagues. Safe staffing through shift by shift ratios is what you are seeking, and your Queensland nursing and midwifery colleagues stand with you shoulder to shoulder in this quest. The need for ratios is obvious to us, and we are so frustrated that others cannot see what is so blindingly obvious.

Ratios not only save lives, they save money. And we have the evidence to prove this.

Five years ago, Queensland became the fourth jurisdiction in the world to legislate minimum nurse to patient ratios in public hospital prescribed medical and surgical units. Just last month, on International Nurses Day, an independent evaluation of this initiative by Professors Linda Aiken and Matthew McHugh from University of Pennsylvania and colleagues from Queensland University of Technology was published in the prestigious international medical journal The Lancet.

This evaluation found that the implementation of ratios in these sites had saved 145 lives and resulted in an estimated $70 million in savings through decreased adverse events and length of stay.  Importantly, it is estimated that this dollar saving represented more than double the “return on investment” of the cost of employing the additional nursing staff required to meet the minimum ratios.

Yet, evidence alone will not achieve change – action is required. And the courageous action you are taking is acknowledged and admired.

Nurses and midwives are tired of being seen as a cost on a balance sheet and instead need to be seen for what they are – an essential investment required  to achieve quality health outcomes and ensure patient safety.  We must shift the thinking from cost to value. We are worth it.

Your action  is inspirational and we stand in solidarity with you in your current struggle.  We continue our campaign to extend ratios to all settings. We all will not rest until we see a care guarantee delivered via ratios in all sectors and settings.

Together, we can and must do this.

Keep up the great fight!

 

In solidarity,

Beth Mohle

Secretary

Queensland Nurses and Midwives’ Union

On behalf of QNMU members and Council

We won’t forget you, Albanese tells staff

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Labor leader Anthony Albanese called on PM Morrison to explain why he rejected many of the royal commission’s most important recommendations – including a nurse on duty at all times.

In his reply to the Budget, Mr Albanese also criticised the government’s failure to support increases in “the appallingly low wages of hard-working aged care staff.”

He pledged a Labor government “will not forget the dedicated, mostly female staff who care for our elderly, [and are] almost  uniformly understaffed and underpaid.”

Labor would ensure that “every dollar spent in aged care goes to employing a guaranteed minimum level of nurses, assistants and carers, and to daily needs like decent food – rather than into the pockets of the more unscrupulous providers.”

“We also support the Fair Work Commission moving quickly to meaningfully lift the wages of aged care workers,” he said.

Biden puts $400 billion into home-based care

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The US President’s $2 trillion stimulus package for US jobs and infrastructure includes $400 billion over eight years for home-based, long-term healthcare services.

Economic commentators point out that Biden deliberately included the investment in care as part of the economic agenda, arguing that it would create better, higher-paying jobs and unleash untapped potential for growth.

“This is an absolutely critical piece of the package. We think of it as core to our nation’s infrastructure,” said Heather Boushey, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

If implemented in full, it would represent the single largest investment in home- and community-based services for disabled and older people in American history.

The plan, however, is expected to face fierce opposition from the Republican Party.

The plan outlines how caregivers would receive “a long-overdue raise, stronger benefits and an opportunity to organise or join a union”.

The inclusion of the home-care funding – close to twice current expenditures – came after intense lobbying by the SEIU, the union that represents more than one million carers.

According to the SEIU, the median salary for a home-care worker is approximately $17,200 a year. More than half of home-care workers are on some form of public assistance such as food stamps. They are overwhelmingly female and far more likely to be people of colour than the general population.

British nurse fined £10,000 for 1 per cent pay protest

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Sixty-one-year-old nurse Karen Reissmann is hammered with a £10,000 fine, despite taking all precautions to ensure her protest was COVID-safe.

Karen and 40 colleagues were protesting in St Peter’s Square, Manchester, against the government’s one per cent pay rise for NHS workers.

She has worked as a frontline nurse throughout the pandemic, and was handed the fine in March despite offering a risk assessment of her protest to Greater Manchester Police (GMP) and ensuring it was COVID-safe. She had limited the number of protesters to guarantee social distancing.

GMP assistant chief constable, Nick Bailey, said the force’s lawyers had reviewed the £10,000 (A$18,000) fine and were “satisfied that the issue was proportionate, legal, accountable and necessary in the circumstances”.

Karen, who has been a nurse for 39 years, told The Guardian: “Somebody calculated that if I used my one per cent pay rise, it would take me 56 years to pay off the fine.”

Karen said she believed the force’s desire to prosecute was meant to intimidate other nurses from organising protests.

“It’s so punitive; clearly designed to stop others. I know people who stepped back from protesting because they were afraid of the £10,000 fine,” she said.

ACTU condemns Colombian government violence

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The Colombian government has responded with brutal repression to widespread civil unrest that started with a national strike organised by the Colombian union movement.

As The Lamp went to press, police and military units had killed more than 40 protestors.

According to reports from human rights organisations, by 10 May there had been more than 1089 cases of violence, 726 arbitrary detentions, 234 wounded, five demonstrators had disappeared and six women raped by ESMAD soldiers (Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios – the Mobile Anti-Disturbances Squadron).

Working people, led by an alliance of trade unions and social groups, have taken to the streets daily since the national strike on 28 April to oppose a tax reform bill, which would have increased inequality by disproportionately impacting workers and the poor, who were already struggling with the economic impacts of COVID-19.

More than 80,000 people have died from COVID in Colombia.

In a letter to the Colombian President, Ivan Duque, the ACTU said: “The Australian union movement stands in solidarity with the workers in Colombia who have taken the brave decision to continue with peaceful demonstrations in line with the decisions of the Comité Nacional del Paro (National Strike Committee).

“Colombia is already the most dangerous place in the world to be a trade unionist, with more than 3000 trade unionists murdered since 1989. Most of these crimes remain unresolved, as your government has failed to address the culture of impunity.”

Biden tells the world – unions build strong communities

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Times are pretty strange, right?

Like when you hear an American President stand up on the floor of Congress and say the following, you know things have changed.

“Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class. And that’s why I’m calling on Congress to pass the Protecting the Right to Organise Act and send it to my desk to support the right to unionise.”

These are the words of President Joe Biden in his first speech to Congress as President last week to mark 100 days in office, reversing decades of hostility, indifference and neglect of America’s working people, and telling the world what we already know – unions improve the lives of workers, their families and communities.

On the Job spoke with ACTU Secretary Sally McManus who was delighted to hear President Biden giving voice to the urgent need to protect the rights of workers to organize, and the acknowledgement of the role of unions as a force for good in civil society.

“After a thirty-year project of attacking unions, the US under President Biden has done an about face. Attacking unions has led to massive inequality and a huge class of working poor,” McManus said.

“President Biden is the first President in a long time to not just be completely unapologetic in being a “union man”, but he is intent on reversing the laws that have suppressed unions.

“When working people are held back, so is a society, and President Biden knows it.”

Compare President Biden’s understanding of the role of unions in building a better nation with the behavior of the Morrison government and its failed attempts to further destroy unions in Australia.

There was the nasty ‘Ensuring Integrity’ legislation of 2019 that was designed to further restrict union access to workers, criminalise union activism and to put unions into an administrative straitjacket that made it virtually impossible for them to function.

It was defeated in the Senate after an unrelenting campaign of opposition by unionists and their supporters.

The Morrison government wasn’t ready to give up on its anti-union obsession and came back with another swing at the movement in late 2020, putting up its ill-fated Omnibus Bill which would have cut workers’ pay and entitlements with little recourse for unions.

It too was punted in the Senate, leaving Scott Morrison, Michaela Cash and Christian Porter empty handed and red faced.

The contrast between the US President’s conviction that unions provide the foundation for working people to lead prosperous lives and build strong communities, and the Australian conservative obsession with destroying unions couldn’t be more stark.

Ryan Batchelor is the Executive Director of the progressive think tank The McKell Institute Victoria. He told On the Job that the Biden speech offers unions in Australia a chance to reframe the conversation about their importance.

“It shows what a difference an election makes, when you have someone elected who understands that trickledown economics doesn’t work and hasn’t delivered, but also recognises that the key to rebuilding [the American] economy is to make sure that working people have collective strength and that is best achieved through unions,” said Batchelor.

“They [unions] deliver better pay, conditions and a better community for everyone.”

Whilst President Biden’s speech focusses on the American economy and the plight of its workers, Batchelor believes that the change in attitude towards unions can resonate in Australia and provides an opportunity for workers to fight back against the continued demonisation of unions by the Morrison government and its fellow travellers in the media.

It also provides huge encouragement to continue to press the case for a bold, expansive, nation-building agenda like that which is outlined in Australian Unions’ own plan for a stronger, balanced and inclusive recovery.

“I think what we’ve got in Australia is that, fundamentally, we haves seen that good government programs [campaigned for and won by unions] change lives – like Medicare and superannuation,” Batchelor said.

“Australians understand that transformative social programs can change lives and that those should be funded by good government spending, and then government revenue raising to help pay for them.

“That’s why you see massive public support for an increase in taxation to help pay for a better aged care system, because people know that you can’t have good services without paying for them.”

At the top of the agenda for American and Australian workers is establishing new, secure, well paid jobs with the right to organise and to collective bargaining. Batchelor said that the pandemic exposed just how disastrous the gig economy and insecure work for workers and their communities.

“The last 12 months have shown us that insecurity for some means vulnerability for all.

“People in insecure work, who turn up to work sick, because they don’t have sick leave or any leave at all. We had people moving between multiple jobs because they’re working more than one job to make enough money to live on. Those sorts of employment circumstances have consequences for us all.”

The Biden speech alone won’t change anything for workers in America or Australia, but Ryan Batchelor believes that seizing the moment and pushing for real change has arrived.

“People have seen the problem. Now it’s time to push for a solution because moments like these show us that sometimes we need to have changes to the rules of the game in order to see some benefits for everyone.”

Francis Leach is the editor-at-large at the Australian Council of Trade Unions. It was originally posted on the Australian Unions website here: Biden tells the world – unions build strong communities.