Worker abuse has to stop
PARKING officers on the streets are being spat on, receiving death threats, being pushed and “car attacked’’.
In libraries, female staff say they are being “hit with paper, books and have water thrown at them’’.
Even staff at refuse centres are having to defend themselves from “flying” bins.
Welcome to the frontline of council work where the number of reported attacks, both verbal and physical, is skyrocketing.
A sickening attack on a parking inspector in Southport mall on Wednesday brought the issue into the public eye, when a 59-year-old officer was king-hit and struck twice more before hitting his head on the footpath.
The incident – one of 68 recorded by frontline council staff already this year, up from the 58 in 2013-14 – was allegedly triggered over a ticket for a car parked illegally.
Less than six months earlier another inspector was assaulted while helping a homeless man. A councillor said the person was yet to return to work.
Of course, attacks on council workers are nothing new. A Bulletin investigation in 2012 revealed 45 per cent of staff citywide said they had been abused verbally and more than a quarter reported being attacked physically.
And they are just the ones we know about with employees saying a culture had developed where staff were not reporting conflict.
A number of councils in Australia and abroad have tried various measures to reduce attacks.
One in NSW launched a website to help combat the worrying trend while Leeds City Council in England introduced shoulder-mounted cameras to make staff safer after going through a hot period of abuse five years ago. The number of attacks dropped from 154 to 79.
The Gold Coast decided to pair up parking officers in April 2013 and even offered training in martial arts and self-defence. Figures suggest it hasn’t worked.
Council believed parking officers had been targeted because motorists wrongly thought they had to issue a set number of tickets. “We don’t have a quota. We never had a quota. It’s absolute crap,’’ a councillor once said.
Walking the streets issuing parking tickets, helping people find books and DVDs and saving lives on Gold Coast beaches are not the most popular jobs in the city. But where would we be without them? You would struggle to find a car park in the city and our libraries, used by most residents, would be dysfunctional.
Yet we are content to abuse those people for simply doing their jobs. Like any profession, that must be respected.
There is no excuse for the abuse, no matter how much they sometimes irritate us, and those responsible should be severely punished to ensure that climbing statistic of wrongdoing recedes.