Water & Ports
Redundancy And Redeployment
- Details
- Published on Wednesday, 27 February, 2008
Last year the ASU held meetings in all workplaces across Sydney Water where members overwhelmingly voted to reject Sydney Water’s proposal to:
• Create different employment conditions for new starters who will have their redundancy entitlement capped at 52 weeks.
• Cut redeployees redundancy entitlement by 25% after they have been in the redeployment pool for 3 months and then continue to reduce the redundancy entitlement for every additional week in the redeployment pool.
Negotiations
The ASU negotiating team has presented the position of the membership to Kerry Schott and have also sought to get the deadline for implementing this proposal extended. These negotiations have resulted in the following changes:
• Lift the deadline of implementation from 1st Jan 2008 to 1st March 2008
• Create a review panel to examine the operation of the redeployment pool which the ASU will be a part of
• Change their proposal to cut redeployment entitlements by 25% after 3 months in the redeployment pool to 10% after 6 months and then continue to reduce each week in the redeployment pool.
Kerry Schott is firmly committed to changing what she describes as a ‘redundancy culture’ in Sydney Water and believes the best way to achieve this is to reduce the redundancy entitlement for new starters and to place financial penalties on employees after 6 months in the redeployment pool.
At the last meeting which was held Thursday 14th February and attended by Deputy Secretary Naomi Arrowsmith, Water Committee of Management member Paul Muller (Frosty) and ASU Organiser Lisa Johnstone, Sydney Water refused to move any further from their proposed position and are planning to implement this policy on 1st March 2008.
Where to now?
A delegates meeting has been called for Wednesday 27th February 2008 at the Grey Hound Social Club in Yagoona to discuss what our options are and members meetings will be organised in each workplace to decide what the next step is.
