Kate Lee who is the Assistant Secretary of the Australian Services Union NSW has been interviewed on the Sector Workforce Issues by Miguel Ferrero (MF), convener of the Traning Directions Network. This is a summary of the conversation.
What has been your career path to your current job?
I’m currently employed as an organiser in the Social & Community Services Division of the Australian Services Union.
What in your opinion are the key workforce issues faced by the community sector?
The biggest issues could be summarized as: low pay compared to work of equal value in the public sector; high turnover of staff into other sectors/industries; lack of career paths and opportunities; lack of minimum qualifications to work in the industry; short term funding and competitive funding arrangements which provide no job security for staff.
What strategies the sector could develop to address these issues?
The biggest current strategy would be if everyone in the sector backed the campaign for Equal Pay being run in our sector . The ASU is running the legal case for equal pay in 2010 however we are also wanting to work with everyone on a coordinated concurrent campaign for full funding for the outcome of the case. The campaign is known as “Equal Pay= Full Funding”.
What is your advice to the Community Sector that could be helpful to face these issues?
There are many small-scale workplace things that employers can do to improve on things like turnover of staff. However all of the issues listed above really require sector-wide agreement on what we need to do to address them. Addressing the issue of low pay through the Equal Pay case will certainly go a long way to helping keep skilled and qualified workers in our sector. However on many of the other issues we need a single and agreed message to government on how to address them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment