Tasmanian health professionals hold stopworks

Susan Austin, Hobart

On September 22, 600 health professionals attended stop-work meetings in Hobart, Launceston and Burnie to discuss their current campaign for a new industrial agreement. Tasmania has about 1100 health professionals, including physiotherapists, medical scientists and radiographers.

The meetings adopted a resolution calling on Labor Premier Paul Lennon to "intervene in this dispute and negotiate with our unions a package that truly addresses our recruitment and retention problems. If such intervention does not occur before 5pm on Monday September 26, 2005, we authorise the health professionals campaign committee to develop and implement a program of bans and limitations in all workplaces ... and of rolling industrial stoppages across all health professions."

At the Hobart rally in Franklin Square, Helen Burnett, president of the health professionals sub-branch of the Health and Community Services Union, said "health professionals are very angry" at the lack of a serious response by the government to a claim lodged by the union 14 months ago.

She pointed out that staff shortages had resulted in 350 child protection cases in southern Tasmania awaiting investigation.

"It is not acceptable to have health professionals in justice forced out of their jobs because they lack professional support", Burnett said. "It is not acceptable to expect psychologists and social workers dealing with more complex mental health cases to continually increase their caseload and complexity." Burnett stated that "health professionals are the backbone of the health system, and right now the health system has a broken back".

"Members have had to go through several cycles of industrial action in this long campaign — we've been going for 14 months now — and I don't think it's acceptable for a government to sit back and let the community suffer — they have to do something to resolve this dispute", Tom Lynch, branch secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union, told Green Left Weekly. "The outcome of the agreement must make it easier for Tasmanian services to recruit and retain health professionals."

He pointed out that Tasmania only provides training for 17 of the 20 health professional disciplines employed in the state, and asked: "Why would somebody from the mainland come here to start a job in which there is no professional support, where workloads are out of control, for lower wages than they could get elsewhere?"

From Green Left Weekly, September 28, 2005.

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From GLW issue 644