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Aboriginal Land Council: CPSU NSW members to vote on protected action

Vote – Sept 2020 (PDF version)

The NSW Aboriginal Land Council (NSWALC) wants to cut your pay and align your salary to low-paying employers in the social and community sector, in a race to the bottom.

How do we know? Because they’ve told us.

At the same time, many (if not all) senior NSWALC staff have their salaries linked to wage outcomes for senior executives in the NSW Public Sector. In practice that means if public sector wages go up, so do their salaries. It’s a similar deal for Members of the Council.

Reckon that’s fair? Neither do we.

To be clear, NSWALC has proposed the following changes to your employment arrangements:

• Moving to a 38-hour week without financial compensation
• Expanding core hours and reducing bandwidth
• Reducing access to Flex Time
• Reducing annual leave for remote-area staff
• Abolishing access to overtime payments for staff on salary level 10 and above
• Abolishing extended leave entitlements for long serving staff
• Combining and reducing Sick Leave and Family/Carers Leave from a total of 20 days to 10 days
• Abolishing leave loading
• Removing lactation breaks from the enterprise agreement for working mums
• Making voluntary redundancy and incentive payments for excess staff discretionary
• Abolishing the option of salary maintenance for excess staff
• Transitioning existing staff to new “salary bands” under a new job classification system
• Abandoning universal annual increases in pay that keep pace with inflation
• Abolishing trade union rights
• Otherwise seeking to omit various other leave entitlements from the next enterprise agreement

In relation to NSWALC’s proposed remuneration arrangements, it appears future increases in salaries would be:

• at the absolute discretion of NSWALC
• dependant on trends taken from a controlled market sample and compared with base rates for salary bands
• further dependant on employee performance; and
• distributed with reference to an unincorporated “matrix” formula, from an as yet undefined employee grouping (or pool), without any requirement to administer increases equitably (i.e. two employees in a pool may be performing at or above expectations, yet only one receives a salary increase, or alternatively they receive differential outcomes).

Despite what you may have heard, there is no financial crisis at NSWALC. In fact, the organisation’s financial position remains strong.

Nor are staff overpaid. NSWALC staff are for the most part middle-income earners, earning basically enough to cover rent, food, bills, school uniforms and a car. Good luck getting a mortgage.

The changes NSWALC want are clearly intended to put downward pressure on wages. If implemented, we’re convinced real wages will gradually decline at NSWALC and many existing employment conditions will be lost.

In light of this, it’s critical we have the capacity to take protected industrial action and push-back if we need to.

At our meeting of 20 August 2020, CPSU NSW members unanimously endorsed the following actions:

• That the Branch Secretary of the CPSU write to all Councillors of the NSWALC expressing deep concern regarding developments in enterprise bargaining and the likelihood of industrial action at NSWALC.
• That the Branch Secretary of the CPSU seek an urgent meeting with the Hon. Don Harwin, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs concerning developments in enterprise bargaining and the likelihood of industrial action at NSWALC.
• That the Branch Secretary of the CPSU make arrangements for the urgent submission of an application for a Protected Action Ballot Order (PABO) on behalf of CPSU members at NSWALC.

We have prepared the PABO application including the list of proposed actions you’ll be asked to vote in support of. This not a decision we take lightly.

We will also shortly write to NSWALC Councillors and the Minster for Aboriginal Affairs to outline our concerns.

We have attached an FAQ on protected industrial action for your information. The Australian Electoral Commission will conduct the ballot and we’re asking you to VOTE YES in support of every proposed action.

For further information contact Kirra Jackson at or Thane Pearce at or call us on 1300 772 679. Alternatively, get in touch with one of our bargaining representatives:

Diane Lee (CPSU NSW Delegate)
Peter Lalor
Shannon Field
Stu Jordan

Not a member?

JOIN the CPSU today.

United We Bargain, Divided We Beg!