Summary of employment principles being used
• Where possible, current Local Government employees will continue to be employed in similar positions within the new Shires.
• Where possible, employees will have their employment conditions transferred across to the new Shires up to 1 July 2009, provided they compare reasonably to those conditions offered in relevant awards.
• Continuity of employment conditions will apply even if an employee is transferred to another location within the new Shire area.
• Redundancies (forced or voluntary) will not be considered until 1 July 2009.
• Current employment agreements, such as EBAs and AWAs will be respected for the life of the agreement.
• Employees are entitled to be informed in writing of the nature of any changes being considered due to amalgamations at the earliest opportunity.
Despite negotiations and the development of Employee Principles in the leadup to Local Government reform in the Northern Territory, numerous reports are emerging of chaos in the way job offers have been handled.
The reform, which came into effect at 1 July, saw the Territory’s 57 Community Government Councils and ‘Association Councils’ compacted into eight super Shires. As a result, a number of staff needed to be placed in new jobs or new Shires.
Australian Services Union (ASU) Industrial Officer, Lucio Matarazzo, said to protect employee rights in this process, the ASU presented a comprehensive 12 page Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to the Northern Territory Local Government Advisory Board meeting in June 2007.
Rather than negotiating around this, he said that the Northern Territory Department of Local Government and the Local Government Association of the Northern Territory (LGANT) came up with their own three page set of employment principles. These principles protect employee rights for only 12 months following the introduction of the new Shires.
Lucio Matarazzo said the ASU didn’t sign off on the employment principles, as it had hoped the Northern Territory Government would have implemented legislation similar to that enacted in New South Wales and Queensland last year to better protect employees’ entitlements for three years.
“The principles are worth little, as they are not enforceable in any court of law and rely on the good will of councils and Department of Local Government officers to implement them,” he said. “The News South Wales Government has 11 pages of legislation in its Local Government Act to protect employment conditions of employees dealing with Local Government amalgamation.
“Here in the Northern Territory, we have only one sentence protecting employee conditions in section 262 of the Northern Territory Local Government Act. This does not protect the many hundreds of employees in the Northern Territory Local Government sector, whose common law employment contracts expired with their previous councils on 30 June.”
In June, the Northern Territory News revealed that some workers had been offered packages under the new Shire system that would see them up to $16,000 a year
worse off. Circumstances ranged from losing conditions such as annual return flights home, to the loss in $16,000 a year in wages, due to accrued annual leave and long service leave entitlements not being transferred. In addition, some experienced workers with remote councils were being forced to move to Darwin to take up their new jobs.
Details have also emerged of workers being offered vastly different jobs than they are qualified for. The Northern Territory News revealed an administration worker was offered a job as a housing officer, an essential services officer with Power and Water was offered a job as a gardener, and a plumber was offered $44,000 to stay in a remote community, when he could earn twice that elsewhere.
Northern Territory Local Government Minister, Rob Knight, defended the process, saying only a ‘handful’ of negotiations breached the employment principles set out by the Government.
“I have asked chief executives to review these cases and where necessary, renegotiate with employees and the unions to ensure arrangements are in line with the agreed principles,” he said. “The bottom line is that any staff who are transitioning across to the new Shires are guaranteed for the first 12 months the same terms and conditions, unless they agree to something different.”
Minister Knight said he was pleased with the progress of the reform process but there is still work to be done.
“Local Government reform is a step by step process which doesn’t end with the new Shires coming into effect,” he said. “I have been working hard to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible and as the transition continues we will find solutions to any problems that arise.”
At the time of publication, Lucio Matarazzo said that some problems had been sorted in favour of the employees, while others are still continuing to be resolved.
