August 9, 2026

nurses union

Starting a Union branch is easy – and essential

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In 2024, the NSWNMA blocked an attempt by Calvary Riverina management to replace night-time security guards with cameras and remote monitoring systems.

Management’s disregard for staff safety contributed to a decision by several nurses and midwives to re-form the hospital’s NSWNMA branch, which had been defunct for several years.

“We were able to save our night duty security with Union support. This showed us that as a collective we can be heard and achieve change,” said Brooke Wichman, who became secretary of the new branch.

Brooke said forming the branch was easy.

“One of our members called the Union office and arranged for a NSWNMA rep to come and talk to staff about the benefits of being in the Union and having an effective branch.

“We decided to hold a meeting to explain to staff what the Union does and elect our branch officials.

“Our educators went around the wards encouraging people to attend and we put up posters in the tea rooms. Every member got a text message and email advising them of our first meeting.

“We got a good turnout and we elected a president, secretary, delegates and ward representatives.”

WINNING NEW MEMBERS

With EA negotiations between the NSWNMA and management about to begin, Brooke and Branch President April Mills set out to encourage more staff to join the Union.

Brooke said they wanted to involve as many members as possible in the campaign.

“April and I took membership forms around to all the wards and talked to people about the benefits of being in a strong union.

“We also approached every new staff member and encouraged them to join.

“Older nurses understand the role of the Union but they are a dying breed. It (unionism) is quite foreign to most of the new grads who first hear about it when they get on the job site.

“Talking to new staff about joining is part of the role of being a Union delegate or rep, and most people are happy to sign up.”

Their efforts were highly successful, with about 50 people becoming new members in 2025.

WARD REPS ARE VITAL

Brooke said the existence of a Union rep on every ward was vital to the success of the “No” campaign.

“The ward reps take the discussions and decisions from our branch meetings back to the wards, and we reinforce this with regular updates on the Calvary NSWNMA Facebook page.

“Also, the union office sends out updates to members via email and SMS.”

Brooke said members encountered hostility from regional and national management reps, who took down ‘Vote No’ posters in the tea rooms and replaced them with ‘Vote Yes’ posters.

“This got members’ backs up,” Brooke said. “We see the staff room as a safe haven where we go to have breaks. Also, the EA does not prohibit the display of Union posters.

“Nurses replaced the posters as quickly as they were taken down.

“Management started doing ad hoc ward rounds that they’ve never done previously. They even came in at midnight trying to convince people to vote ‘Yes’, which also annoyed the staff.”

During EA negotiations, management rejected almost all ANMF claims with minimal discussion, declared negotiations were at an impasse, and announced they would proceed to a vote.

BACK-PAY THREAT

In the lead-up to the ballot, management warned that a ‘No’ vote would result in the loss of about 11 months back pay.

“Management were quite forthright in saying, if you don’t vote ‘Yes’ you won’t get back pay ever again; we’re going to take that off the table,” Brooke said.

“The branch answered by pointing out that while voting ‘Yes’ might get us a couple of grand back pay – and briefly put us in front of the public sector by 2 per cent or so – our working conditions would only get worse.

We would be locked into the EBA for three years and management would not have to give us anything that the public sector got through the Union’s current special case.”

Calvary Riverina proposed rates are already behind Healthscope and Healthe Care and will fall behind Calvary facilities in Queensland in 2026.

Brooke said the branch was ready to resume EA negotiations in 2026.

The NSWNMA bargaining team that negotiates with management includes April and Brooke, five designated rank and file reps, and an organiser and industrial officer from NSWNMA head office.

“If they win, they would be able to keep wages low and jobs insecure”

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Australian Unions Secretary Sally McManus writes about the very current attacks on workers rights – and why we need to urgently move to action.

A few weeks ago, I went out to alert working people and the community of the risks that employer lobby groups were pressuring Scott Morrison and the Liberal Government to weaken workplace laws.

If the employer lobbyists were successful, it would mean that they would be able to keep wages low and jobs insecure.

Yesterday evening, we got the breaking news.

News outlets have reported that Scott Morrison gave a speech at an employer lobby group event that he decided to push forward with changes to our rights at work that could remove fundamental protections for working people.

“The Prime Minister hinted the changes would allow a more flexible interpretation of the BOOT…” (AFR, 19 Nov 2020)

What is the BOOT? It’s the “Better off overall test”, one of the key laws that ensures that employers can’t cut wages or working conditions below minimum standards.

The employer lobby groups are hoping that this seemingly minor change will be easily passed through the Parliament early next year.

The employer lobby groups are hoping that workers and the community – who relied on workers to carry Australia through the pandemic – will ignore this change.

The employer lobby groups are hoping you won’t care and they are given even more power.

The employer lobby groups are hoping that people will forget that Scott Morrison promised that we “are all in this together”.

I’m asking you to prove them wrong.

We need to stand up against these anti-worker proposals and we need to do it now.

Punishing workers won’t heal the economy. Add your name right now to send the employer lobby groups and Scott Morrison a message.  

Unionized workers are more likely to assert their right to a safe and healthy workplace

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Associate Professor Aaron Sojourner discusses why unionised workplaces are safer workplaces.

Unionized workers are more likely than their non-union peers to speak up about health and safety problems in the workplace, according to a just-published, peer-reviewed study I conducted with Jooyoung Yang, who was a Ph.D. student in applied economics at the time of the research.

To reach this conclusion, we examined over 70,000 unionization votes from 1985 to 2009 and focused on elections where the tally in favour or against was very small. This allowed us to zero in on the impact of unionization itself on worker behaviour. We then compared these workplaces with the number of inspections conducted by state or federal occupational health and safety enforcement agencies that resulted from an employee complaint. We found that unionized workplaces were 30% more likely to face an inspection for a health or safety violation.

The likely reasons why, in my view, are that unions can help organized workers learn about their rights, file complaints and provide greater protections against illegal retaliation by employers.

Why it matters

The health and safety of workers is always a concern, but the current pandemic makes the issue more important than ever, especially for essential workers in health care, retail and child care centers and schools. But beyond them, all workers – including those with typically safe office jobs – are at increased risk of catching the coronavirus.

The costs of providing sufficient protective gear or taking other steps to ensure worker safety can be high, which means some companies have at times resisted doing all they can to protect their employees. What’s more, they are trying to prevent their workers from learning about cases of coronavirus in their workplace and have been lobbying governments for immunity from any liability.

That means it’s even more vital that workers are able to raise their voices when they feel that their workplace is unsafe. Our research suggests belonging to a union can play a big role in ensuring those voices are heard.

This may also be why we’ve seen more workers going on strike and asserting their rights to safer and healthier workplaces.

Aaron Sojourner, Associate Professor and Labor Economist, University of Minnesota

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Banks ignored, unions punished

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Employers get rich from wage theft, banks make millions from unlawful fees, nursing homes are mired in scandal and the Morrison government cracks down on … unions!

The federal Liberal/National government wants greater power to interfere in the work of unions and make it harder for them to win pay rises and protect jobs.

The Ensuring Integrity (EI) Bill now before parliament would give the government, employers, or any other party with ‘sufficient interest’ the power to intervene in the running and work of unions.

The bill would make it easier to disqualify people from holding union office, deregister a union, change a union’s eligibility rules, restrict the use of funds or property of a union and more.

Labor and the Greens oppose the bill, meaning the government needs the support of four of the 
six crossbench Senators for it to become law.

NSWNMA General Secretary Brett Holmes describes the proposed laws as fundamentally unfair.

“They would not apply to business, not apply to banks and not apply to politicians, despite their serious unethical conduct,” he says.

He says the Australian union movement is already heavily regulated and the EI bill goes further than any other western democracy in interfering in unions.

“During the last election campaign the Morrison government insisted it had no plans to reduce workers’ rights.

“Now, Morrison is doing the bidding of big business by dusting off previously failed legislation to weaken the ability of working people to organise.”

No accountability for politicians’ poor behaviour

Brett said numerous scandals in banking, aged care and other corporations had revealed wage theft, fraud, money stolen and elderly people left without enough food.

“However, no one in any of those scandals has been barred from holding office, nor has a single organisation been deregistered.

“If the proposed anti-union laws applied equally to corporations we would see banks, multinational pizza chains and the restaurants of celebrity chefs closed down for repeatedly breaking workplace laws and their top executives sacked.”

Members of Morrison’s own government had not been held to account despite their involvement in numerous scandals, such as ministers going to work for lobbyists, MPs hiding their investments from the public and questionable uses of allowances.

“The Morrison government does nothing about this – it won’t even enforce the weak ministerial code of conduct that is already in place.”

The bill has also attracted criticism from overseas.

The general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, Sharan Burrow, dubbed the legislation “an extraordinary act of vandalism really in terms of the democratic rights and freedoms of Australia”.

Burrow, a former Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) president, said the bill would do  
“far-reaching damage to our democratic structures”.

“Nobody can look at this with an objective eye and say it is anything but an act of some sort of ideological revenge.”

Bank crime gets a free pass

ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has contrasted the federal government’s push to criminalise union activity with its hands-off approach to bank crime.

In an article in The Guardian newspaper, Sally said banks and other financial institutions had admitted to tens of thousands of breaches and the banking royal commission – which Scott Morrison opposed – had uncovered crimes and unethical conduct.

“People would be right to ask why isn’t the government cracking down on the banks?” she wrote.

“Why aren’t they holding press conferences denouncing their behaviours? Why is Scott Morrison having his photo taken with the CEO of a major bank instead of calling for the resignation of the big four banks’ CEOs?

“Why aren’t new laws that stop the banks ripping off working people Morrison’s first priority?”

Instead, Morrison was seeking the power to “knock off member-elected union leaders and shut down their unions.”

“The banks have been forcing farmers off their land, laundering money for drug dealers, charging fees to dead people and forging signatures that have resulted in Australians losing their life savings and even their homes.

“All the union movement is guilty of is standing up for safe workplaces, more secure jobs and fair pay under a regime of oppressive laws that are out of step with the rest of the developed world.”

Nurses a potential target

Labor industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke said the anti-union bill, if passed, would allow employer groups to apply for unions to be deregistered.

“Some of the examples that would make you liable for deregistration are extraordinary,’’ he told ABC radio.

“So, for example, if the nurses’ union decided that a group of nurses who wanted to campaign on better staff ratios, and in doing so, it wasn’t registered lawful industrial action.

“They were simply concerned about the issues of the patients, they had unprotected industrial action. The union could be deregistered for that. The entire nurses’ union deregistered for an action like that, and that action could be brought by anyone deemed to have a sufficient interest.”

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