Aged Care
Aged care wages must rise, says royal commission
The aged care royal commission has called on employers and the federal government to work with unions to improve pay for aged care workers.
In its final report, the royal commission puts forward two recommendations to bridge the wages gap between aged care workers and workers doing equivalent jobs in the acute health sector.
First, it recommends that the government, employers and unions collaborate on a work-value case and equal remuneration application to the Fair Work Commission.
“If successful, this will increase the wages of personal care workers and nurses in both residential and home care,” it says.
Second, it calls for wage increases to become “an explicit policy objective” of government funding.
The commission wants the government to set up a Pricing Authority to set prices for “high-quality and safe” aged care.
It says the authority should price aged care at a level that enables workers to be paid as much as in similar sectors, such as health and disability.
The commission has recommended substantial increases in government subsidies to providers.
However, “merely increasing subsidies… is unlikely to translate into higher wages,” the commission warns.
It notes that successive governments have given additional funds to providers “in the hope that they would be passed on to aged care workers by way of increased wages. They were not”.
Poorly remunerated and under-resourced
In a recent article, three academic experts in the field of human resources describe aged care as vital work that is poorly remunerated and under-resourced.
This “is a grim reality that our society, and our government, need to face,” write Ben Farr-Wharton of Edith Cowan University, Matthew Xerri of Griffith University and Yvonne Brunetto of Southern Cross University.
They say the award rate for a full-time aged care worker at the start of their career, is $21.09 per hour – slightly less than a cleaner, and only $1.25 per hour more than the minimum wage.
They point out that the job is “substantially more complex and demanding, both physically and emotionally,” than cleaning.
“Working in aged care requires someone who is engaged, focused, well-trained and ready to thrive in challenging clinical and social environments.
“Aged care workers also need to contend with the emotional grief associated with end-of-life care and death. They need to do this while professionally engaging with families who themselves may be grief-stricken.”
The three academics say societal values have radically shifted over the past decade.
Australians now expect “very high levels of quality care, and there is now an appetite for change in the way we value ageing, and those who work in aged care”.
They draw parallels with the nursing profession in the first half of the 20th century.
“At that time, nurses were widely regarded as little more than cleaners and carers who happened to work in hospitals.”