BY KAREN FLETCHER
BRISBANE — A social services wing of the Uniting Church has cut the wages and conditions of its disability support workers by moving them from their current award to a lower-paid state award.
The rates of pay in the state Disability Support Workers (DSW) award are $2 an hour lower than in the Social and Community Services (SACS) award. A full-time worker could lose up to $4500 per year. The church has promised to provide "financial counsellors" to assist the 54 workers immediately affected to "adjust" to the cut in pay.
Another consequence of Uniting Church Family and Community Support Services' action would be to change workers' union coverage from the Australian Services Union (SACS division), a union with a history of strong support for their members, to the infamously inactive Australian Workers Union.
Uniting Church Family and Community Support Services also operates children's services, family programs, a prisons ministry and homeless women's services. The ASU says there is evidence that they are systematically trying to move all their workers to the lower-paid DSW award as a cost-saving measure.
The Uniting Church has claimed that the change was made necessary by the Queensland government's insistence on using the DSW award as the funding standard.
However, in an email to union members, Penny Carr, the ASU's SACS industry committee representative, said a letter from Disability Services Queensland (which funds the Uniting Church's service) shows that this is not true.
A January 9 meeting of ASU members in the Uniting Church Family and Community Support Services voted to reject their employer's proposal and ask the union to campaign on their behalf.