Public Health
Sick and tired of being overworked and underpaid
It was loud and raucous with a lot of colour and movement but the message from thousands of members at a rally outside Chris Minns’ electoral office was clear and unequivocal: we deserve a 15 per cent.
Public sector nurses and midwives from across New South Wales held a 12.5 hour, and several 24 hour, strikes on 10 September, as our campaign for a 15 per cent, one-year pay rise ramped up.
As The Lamp goes to print a second strike is about to take place.
Fed up with being ignored by the government, thousands of NSWNMA members walked off the job throughout NSW.
Busloads of members from all the major Sydney metropolitan hospitals converged on the Premier’s Kogarah office to deliver a united message for change.
“Nurses and midwives campaigned hard for this government. This government offered the hope of change. They promised to value frontline and essential workers. And yet today we have been forced to the streets because this government has ignored us and taken us for granted,” NSWNMA General Secretary Shaye Candish told the crowd.
“The state government is not bargaining in good faith. Not once in our 10 negotiation meetings has the government sat at the table and discussed nurses and midwives’ pay.”
Shaye said the government and Ministry of Health had been forthcoming on minor issues such as the right to a notice board but there was a deathly silence on substantive issues like pay and a right to have two days off.
Shaye said members were sick and tired of being undervalued, overworked, and not listened to.
She pointed out that the government had promised during the election to lift the wages cap and to reinvest productivity savings into wages.
“We found the productivity savings needed to pay for our pay increase in a business case prepared by prominent financial advisers, Deloitte. That analysis went through a validation process with government to confirm the efficiencies were real, and yet despite this, there is still no revised wage offer.”
According to Deloitte’s financial analysis, the state government has missed out on untapped Commonwealth revenue due to inaccurate hospital reporting. The report also highlighted widespread savings to be generated by reducing costs associated with staff turnover, overtime, agency staffing, and hospital acquired complications.
This increase in revenue and savings would cover the cost of implementing our 2024 claim.
“We did everything they asked for, jumped through every hoop and still no revised wage offer,” Shaye said.
She said the government had to face up to two particular challenges posed by low pay for NSW nurses and midwives – the attraction of other states with better pay and conditions and the gender pay gap.
“It’s clear the state government is choosing to pay nurses and midwives the lowest wages in the country, and it will continue to see our public health system fall apart if it doesn’t pay nurses and midwives enough to stay in NSW.”
“NSW Labor was elected on a platform of gender equity and supporting women in work. They’re now refusing to fix the gender pay gap and not deliver the state’s largest female-dominated workforce fair and reasonable pay.
“A workforce of 86 per cent females has its own unique gender-based challenges that is exacerbated by denying us two days off in a row!”
Shaye said the NSWNMA was asking “the women of this government to help and to stand up for us. We need these women to look at the stats, look at the data and demand their own government address the gender bias that keeps wages low and denies basic conditions for nurses and midwives.”