Archived Industrial News: February 2005

Nurses to feel cold winds of industrial change

In July 2005, the Australian Government will assume control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This means that after this date, there will be no impediment to the Howard Government passing laws as it sees fit.
Prime Minister Howard has always advocated changes to industrial relations laws that, in his view, will promote the deregulation of the labour market in Australia.

Come July 2005, we can expect his government will work to implement its industrial agenda in full.

In campaigning and advocating for industrial relations changes, the Howard Government has highlighted disputes in the blue-collar construction and manufacturing industries to justify its industrial program.

Because of this focus on blue-collar industries, many nurses may think they will be insulated from any industrial relations changes or that the changes will not affect their employment.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The Howard Government's industrial changes will not target particular workers or industries; rather, they will pursue three broad policy objectives:

1) to reduce the effectiveness of trade unions to collectively represent their members;

2) to increase the right of employers to make decisions about their employees and their workplaces; and

3) to further reduce the role of industrial tribunals to act as an independent umpire in disputes between employees and employers.

It is worth considering how nurses may be affected by these changes.
Nurses represent the largest occupational group in health and therefore represent the largest labour cost to employers.

As funding bodies and hospital managers continue to grapple with ways to reduce costs, they will be drawn to using a deregulated labour market to reduce the cost of providing nursing services.

A likely approach will be to seek to replace ANF collective agreements with individual contracts or Australian Workplace Agreements (AWAs) which provide reduced and different rates of pay and conditions of employment. This is despite the fact that AWAs are time consuming and costly to implement.

Reducing the numbers of nursing staff or changing the skill-mix in a particular establishment could also be used as a strategy to reduce labour costs.
Most observers agree that the nursing labour shortage is long term and entrenched. This view has led governments and policy makers to initiate programs to attract more people into nursing as a career choice, or to encourage nurses who have left nursing back into the profession.

Strategies have included the various workload mechanisms that have been incorporated into public sector agreements in most states and territories.
In a deregulated labour market, it will be open to employers to ignore existing workload and skill-mix requirements, and to replace nursing positions with unqualified staff.

This cannot be dismissed as doomsday hyperbole. When New Zealand entered a period of deregulation in the 1980s, all employees were drawn into a downward spiral as their employers competed to reduce labour costs unchecked by an industrial tribunal acting as a referee and weighing up the effects of the proposed changes on employees.

No one was spared because even employers who sought to maintain productive relationships with unions and staff were forced to make drastic cuts and introduce other punitive measures simply to stay in business.
Nurses can expect the imperatives hospital managers and others responsible for financial outcomes will face will override any consideration of fairness for nurses in the workplace.

During the next federal parliamentary term, we will see the extent to which the Howard Government moves to deregulate the industrial labour market and the impact this will have on employers and employees.

Unfortunately, because nurses provide nursing care to the community, we can expect the casualties of these changes will not just be nurses themselves, but the people for whom nurses care.

Nick Blake
Federal Industrial Officer