union

Branch Beat with NSWNMA Assistant General Secretary Michael Whaites

New South Wales covers more than 800,000 square kilometers. This makes it one and a half times the size of France and it is bigger than one of Asia’s larger countries, Turkey.

Naturally this creates logistical issues for an organisation such as the NSWNMA with health services reaching to all corners of the state.

It has never prevented NSW nurses and midwives from working together in common cause but now technology gives us opportunities to deepen those relationships, share experiences and resolve problems in new ways despite the issues of distance or isolation.

In this Branch Beat The Lamp looks at how our members at Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, in multiple workplaces and with staff dispersed across NSW, have married technology and traditional forms of organising to create an effective statewide network and branch.

Innovative thinking overcomes tyranny of distance

Staff at Lifeblood collect blood, plasma and platelet donations, send them off to be processed and then released in hospitals and other health settings across NSW, and in some instances, they are also sent overseas.

They have 24 different donor centres across NSW. Kayla Wipiti, the branch secretary at Lifeblood NSW says this “is definitely a challenge”, different to other Association branches that can have face-to-face meetings.

Meeting on Zoom has played a large part in rising to this challenge and using the technology has its own advantages, she says.

“People don’t need to be at work the day of a meeting to attend: they can dial in while they are making dinner or when the kids have gone to bed.

“As bargaining goes on, we are getting more members joining our union and joining our Zoom meetings. And because we have members who have worked at lots of different sites and divisions of Lifeblood, we are able to look at issues in a lot more detail: you really don’t realise what is going on until we talk to each other across the state.

“I’m still learning if I am honest: every single day I am finding out new things that I did not know not only about the union but what is happening across the state.”

Pay and staffing big issues

Kayla says the Lifeblood Enterprise Agreement expired in June 2021 and “since then, our pay has gone down in real terms, and we’ve had no improvements to benefits and conditions”.

This, she says, was the spur to form a branch in March of this year.

Starting from a low base, “union membership at Lifeblood is growing every week”.

The online conversations have also revealed a raft of other issues including around staffing.

“Contract staff in NSW can have their hours spread over short shifts spread over many days. For example, I am on a 60-hour contract, but it is spread over nine days when technically I could work 10 or 12-hour shifts over five or six days. But Lifeblood like to spread us over as many days as possible,” Kayla says.

“Their idea is to have more bodies on the floor at busy times. But the shift work means that part-time staff can’t find a second job because they don’t know what hours they will be working. The vast majority of the nursing staff in the donor centre are part-timers, and don’t have the option to work full-time, even though many would like more hours.”

An impressive branch structure

In a short period of time Lifeblood members have put together an impressive statewide branch structure.

“We formed a branch executive team, and because we are a large branch – we have witnessed a whopping 37% growth in our total membership since October 2022 – we have a very large number of delegates.

“We have three branch delegates: myself from the metropolitan region, and a branch president, Kelly Costello, who is from the Lismore donor centre, and Mary Marell from the Wollongong centre who is also the vice-president.

“We also have three alternate delegates, Hsi-Man Stella Lin, who is also the assistant secretary, and Kathy Taylor and Kathryn Richards, as well as 14 branch stewards from sites across regional and metro.

Issues to resolve, motivation to do so

Kayla says the branch wants to have minimum staffing requirements and there is plenty of motivation to achieve their goals.

“Currently, our EA states there must be one RN on site for use to take collections or donations, but we want to have more than that because legally the RN can’t leave the site or go out for lunch – if they do, the centre can’t continue collections.

“We did a member survey for our log of claims and asked whether members would be prepared to undertake protected action and found that 60 per cent said ‘yes, if that’s what it takes, I am ready to take action’, and a further 34 per cent said they would consider it after we’ve tried everything first.

“I don’t think something like this has happened before at Lifeblood.

“But there are many other steps we could take before we take state wide actions.”