Sale is the first facility within the Domain group to be affected with plans to replace nine Division 2 nurses with nine personal care worker students straight from TAFE. On ABC radio, the chief executive officer recently asserted that the resident care levels would not be affected.
Domain will use endorsed Division 2 nurses to cover day and evening shifts. This allows Domain to reduce some Division 1 hours and surprisingly, some personal care workers will also lose hours.
ANF has already been to the Australian Industrial Relations Commission and will return there again. At the first conference, Commissioner Cribb determined that Domain had not followed the proper procedures in making staff redundant. This will delay any potential redundancies by four to six weeks. During this time ANF will continue to pursue safe staff numbers, skill mix and care levels in the interests of the residents. As members will be aware, this is difficult without any federal legislative requirement that aged care providers employ a safe number of nurses or account for how they spend taxpayer funding.
Workchoices means pay cuts are legal
The proposal to dismiss all the unendorsed Division 2 registered nurses at Domain would not have been possible before the radical new WorkChoices laws. Domain has told its non-endorsed Division 2 registered nurses that after they are made redundant they can apply for their same jobs with lower pay as personal care workers.
There may be no appeal under the Howard Government's workplace laws as WorkChoices allows Domain to say that the dismissals are for "operational reasons". If it is even partly due to "operational reasons" employees are not allowed to lodge an unfair dismissal claim.
ANF has questioned the validity of the redundancies. The job is not disappearing. The work is not disappearing. It will just cost the employer a lot less under WorkChoices to employ these nurses as personal care workers.
