Moves by Transport for NSW (TfNSW) to remove as many as 950 award and senior service direct employee jobs from the organisation to contain costs are headed to the state’s industrial umpire, after the agency revealed it still has 754 labour hire staff on its books.
As the timeframe to push through the massive restructure by the end of the year counts down, the Public Service Association has moved to invoke the conditions of the TfNSW and Sydney Metro awards that the union says require the employer to “use direct permanent employment as the preferred and predominant staffing option for the employer.”
The fight is a fairly straightforward one, and will have the Minns government crossing its fingers that enough staff are ready to go and will grab one of the early exit packages on offer.
That’s because when push comes to shove, the PSA is demanding that outsourced staff are chopped before insourced staff, and it’s an issue that can legally be firmly pressed.
“The PSA contends that not a single award position should be cut until those labour hire positions are deleted. The PSA’s position is that whilst ever labour hire roles are being utilised, any proposal to cut permanent award roles is a breach of the award and should be paused until such roles are removed,” the PSA said in communications to members.
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The high number of labour hire staff, proportional to the proposed number of permanent roles slated for deletion, is a real problem for the Minns government because it potentially throws a spanner in the works of washing off contingent liability from the accrual of permanent employee entitlements.
While it’s easy to let labour hire staff go — many can be dispatched with as little as four hours’ notice — casual staff don’t accrue leave that eventually becomes a time bomb for many agencies.
In the interim, it’s a line-by-line, trench-by-trench battle, with unions blowing the stop-play whistle on consultation at the same time they were meant to front the Industrial Relations Committee. The grievance is logistical: authorised representatives cannot be at consultations and the labour court at the same time.
“The fact that the employee consultation was ongoing in these branches at the very time that the unions were conciliating a dispute in the IRC, and the difficulty this places on all unions to be at two places at once, was a key point of the conciliation,” the PSA told members.
“As a result, TfNSW confirmed in the IRC that there would be no further employee consultation occurring next week, to allow conciliation in the IRC to continue.”
Transport has confirmed that the labour hire numbers cited by the PSA are accurate and that the roles in scope for reductions will come from back-office roles like business and executive support, project support, communications, technology, and government and parliamentary services.
“Transport for NSW will continue to prioritise savings through cutting labour hire expenditure, as part of other financial sustainability measures that have been budgeted for,” a Transport for NSW spokesperson told The Mandarin.
“We will achieve these savings on short-term temporary roles while also ensuring the size of our permanent workforce is sustainable to meet the needs of what we are required to do now and into the future.
“Our new statewide operating model is focused on reducing duplication and finding efficiencies in the way we work at Transport, and with partners across all sectors.”