A welcome change of venue at Gympie Regional Council

As your ally in the workplace at Gympie Regional Council, The Services Union understands that you have continued to deliver quality services to the community through floods, health scares and significant understaffing. 

For more than a year, we have been by your side bargaining with the Council to achieve a wage outcome that properly values your productivity, skills and effort.   

It took the Council six months to come up with a pay offer, and even then it was a laughable 1.5% each year. Therefore it’s no surprise the negotiations have reached their first birthday, a birthday which you’d hardly celebrate.

Rather than focusing on improving morale, filling vacant positions and delivering you a wage rise that goes some way to assisting with the increased cost of living, the Council’s leadership seems more focused on impressing the Mayor and blaming others. While some senior executives have made it clear they’d prefer us not to be here at all, the good news is that we have shifted the Council closer to offering an acceptable package. However, the devil is in the detail of how the Council wants to deliver its proposed package over the life of the agreement; meanwhile the cost of living and your understaffing show no signs of improvement.

Because our Union will not sign you up to a sub-standard package, last week the Council requested the assistance of the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission (QIRC) to make the new Agreement. Yesterday the QIRC set the hearing date for 23 November in Brisbane. We look forward to the QIRC’s input as a potential means of assisting the Council to overcome its inertia and inability to deliver an acceptable and appropriate pay increase, something the Council could already have done but has chosen not to.