Historic deal just part of the story
OPINION: Last week’s announcement that aged care sector workers will receive a pay increase of between four and seven dollars an hour is an historic breakthrough on a number of fronts and will force a look at other parts of our communities where people quietly and loyally go about essential work, but receive quite low wages.
This is round-the-clock hard work, both physically and mentally demanding on every day of the year. So I am pleased to see all this come together.
As a society, we all wax on about how important good aged care is, yet we have under-paid a big group of workers for generations. This move addresses pay inequity for a mainly female workforce who do such wonderful work and who will now get a degree of recognition for their skills and experience.
I hope that, in all of this, the other advancements for carers have not been forgotten either. Since this Government has been in office we have been able to settle the issue of payments of carers who, by necessity, have to stay on-site overnight as part of the care that they offer. We were also able to implement travel time allowances for in-home carers.
I feel particularly close to the aged care professionals and I offer my congratulations to Kristine Bartlett from Lower Hutt, who five years ago, had the courage of her convictions to speak up on behalf of fellow workers and say, essentially ‘we’re professional carers and we’re being underpaid, probably because most of us are female.’
Aside from the birth of her children, Kristine describes last week’s $2 billion pay deal to be her greatest accomplishment in life. .
So around 55,000 workers will receive just over 20% extra in their take home pay and hopefully this will address the industry’s high staff turnover rate. But I definitely think there is another chapter to this story and one which I hope can be completed this year.
Teacher aides and school support workers are another sector I regularly connect with. As well as being low paid, they are a vulnerable group. They work with some quite difficult children and their employment is subject to the vagaries of rising and falling school rolls and sudden transient parent moves. It’s usually a casual arrangement with holiday pay built-in, so if a constant pay is opted for, the rate will often fall below the minimum wage.
Most of these people offer added value to school communities. They often do more than their required hours just to ‘see the job done’, be it after school care, covering library books, attending meetings or helping to fund raise.
Last week’s announcement for the aged care sector should open up the thinking about pay equity for these essential contributors to our school communities too.
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