Staff at TasWater have overwhelmingly voted “no” to two Enterprise Agreements presented bythe TasWater Executive.
Professionals Australia director Luke Crowley said that today’s results “speak volumes” for the discontent among staff and provided another example of how “out of touch” the Taswater Executive were, after spending a million dollars on consultants and taking almost a year to restructure the organisation.
The EBA voting results saw87.8 per cent of employees vote “no” to the proposed Taswater General Staff Enterprise Agreement, and 82.4 per cent of employees vote “no” to the proposed Taswater Senior Staff Enterprise Agreement.
“These agreements have been rejected because they are fundamentally unfair. Taswater staff are not asking for the moon, they are just asking for fair treatment compared to others in similar industries in Tasmania”
Mr Crowley said that he was struck by the number of staff who had voted on and rejected the EBAs, saying that it was the strongest rejection of an EBA that he had ever seen.
Mr Crowley continued; “Professionals Australia members have now also taken the extraordinary step of voting to make industrial action available. It is almost unheard of for professional staff to be so upset and frustrated that they consider Industrial Action, but this is where the negotiations have unfortunately now reached forTaswater staff” said Mr Crowley.
Mr Crowley said that double standards in the organisation had also contributed to the discontent, including the fact thatTasWater Executive had benchmarked their own salaries to the national market yet had benchmarked all other senior staff’s salaries to general markets with little relevance to the water and sewerage infrastructure industry. Thishas led to difficulties attracting and retaining skilled technical staff and managers.
“Staff morale at Taswater isat an all-time low – it’s abysmal. The restructure that started almost a year ago, wasonly just complete. Now, Taswater reignites the tension by putting out an offer that everyone but they saw was totally unacceptable and doomed to be rejected – this make itpainfully apparent how out of touch the Taswater Executive is and how little trust exists in the organisation.”
“We are hearing reports of work being constantly being pushed back as a result of the distraction of this mismanagement and bungling. The Taswater Executive seems to have taken its eyes off the core business of delivering essential water and sewerage infrastructure to Tasmanians.
“The real shame of allthis mismanagement and long-term disruption is that it will add to water bills for Tasmanians. In the end, everyone will feel the impact of the problems at the top of Taswater.
In October Taswater put two agreements to a vote of staff, indicating they felt staff would accept the deal. Professionals Australia contacted TasWater stating the offer would be rejected and that negotiations should continue and that the vote was an unnecessary delay and distraction.
TasWater has also rejected calls to negotiate one agreement to cover its employees, instead attempting to negotiate a separate agreement for frontline managers and professional staff, despite the cost and complexity of negotiating two separate agreements and TasWater’s own internal polling showing this was also their employees least preferred option.
Professionals Australia director Luke Crowley
