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And I just thought that I would ... I'll just put this in. We did ... I did a little bit of
comparisons. In the public sector there are youth workers in the public hospital system, but
I ... the ... I haven't got the wage rates here, but what I do have is just some quick
comparisons, depending on different levels. Youth workers under the SAC's award on the left and then
I just put social workers down the bottom, and then I chose a local council to compare differences
in pay. And the differences come from enterprise agreements, they don't come from the
award. So youth workers in local government and the social worker in the public hospital down the
bottom, their wages come from enterprise agreements that have been funded, that
sit on top of the award.
And the reason I put social worker in, was because I wanted to draw to your attention that social
workers also in the community sector face the same issue as youth workers, and social workers
do have a professional association. So a professional association isn't going to fix these
problems for you in and of themselves, and I just wanted to kind of point that out.
So in terms of solutions to the wages problem there's many, but I've just put down three that
I think. The first one is industrial campaigns and, I mean, that's ... an industrial campaign is,
you know, a strictly sort of nurses-type campaign, like nurse to patient ratios. At the end
of the day what that was about was negotiating with the government who's the
employer funding body, that workers need to be paid more in the nursing system and that nurse
patient ... patient ratios was an issue that they used to deliver some increases but at the
end of the day it was an enterprise agreement and wage increases were delivered as
part of that campaign. And that's by being unionised, it's by putting together a claim
and it's by being determined and joining together as a sector to argue for the increases that you're
after. It's ... doesn't sort of get more complex than that, I suppose. Secondly, professional
registration and regulation, and that's, you know, part of the crus of what this
conversation is about today. I think that ... I'll move on to the third one. Improved training career
paths progression and incentives; now that's kind of related to professional registration
and regulation, I think, but in terms of training career paths and progression, there are a
couple of issues; one is that you can ... in the award classification structure itself, there
isn't a career path necessarily, so establishing kind of senior youth work professionals and
things like that are a way to keep people who are quite experienced deliver a bit more money for them
but keep them working face-to-face, 'cause often you lose the more experienced people. So improved
career paths in that sense is what I'm talking about. And also more training and access
to professional development, but in terms of the incentives, what I mean there is that
that should come at a price to the funding body. Workers should have access to professional
development training career paths, but it should also be paid for. To date, in the entire
community sector, there ... we have highly qualified trained professionals working in the field, but
they do the training because it's good, because it improved their practice. They don't do
it because they get paid more, and we believe that there should be incentives built into
the system so you do extra training and courses and therefore you get paid more. That's what
happens in teaching and nursing, and that's through their enterprise bargains,
that's where they get it from.
And so in terms of two and three, professional registration regulation and improved training, in and
of themselves will not deliver improved wages. You need to package up things around it in
order to deliver those things together. And finally, I think all three are required because in
terms of the industrial campaign, the ... I think that part of the campaign to argue for better
valuing of the youth work profession is by showing what level of qualification and pref ...
professionalism you have already, what further career paths and training is required, and to
deliver those things is through an industrial campaign.
So just finally, I think that the discussion today has been really interesting because there are
a whole range of things that you want to achieve out of this process and the first thing you need
need to do is work out what they are, what the priorities are and who does what. And I think
there is real opportunities to work together, I think there isn't a need to re-invent the wheel in terms
of what we do and other things that you're aspiring to, and I think that, you know, we are
in a good position as a union to be able to assist you in whatever way you determine can
deliver some of the other aspirations that aren't yet there, because there's no point working in isolation ,
there's no point working in conflict because I think at the end of the day we want our
members to be happy at work and you want the same thing but in a different ... in a
different way. So I think we need to work out how we can work together. So I think I'll leave it there.
[Applause]