Your powerful action earlier this week has got Child Safety management to at least set up a meeting to talk about your working conditions this morning. Unfortunately, instead of focusing on the real issues, they stuck to what the Minister had already announced – something we made clear won’t fix the workforce shortages across the state.
Thanks to the strong representation from your colleagues who attended the meeting, they’ve now indicated they’ll seriously consider including the five impact days for all workers (except a few who supposedly don’t deal with incidents or trauma – we’ll be keeping an eye on who they exclude) in an interim agreement. This will hold until we negotiate a proper Child Safety Agreement.
We pushed for this to happen ASAP, but we also made it clear that we want to get the full agreement process rolling as well.
We also discussed classification issues, especially with support workers, and they’ve agreed to get back to us with a draft statement of duties by next week.
While there are still plenty of issues, this is one step forward that they actually arranged a meeting and committed to progressing these matters – this is only because of your courage, solidarity and collective strength!
We’ll update you next week and ensure that the department follow through on their commitments.
In the meantime, keep the pressure on by sharing our posts on social media and if you’d like to share your personal stories (anonymously), email us at [email protected]