23 March 2023 The Australian Services Union has secured an agreement with Oxfam Australia to introduce a four-day, 30-hour working week at full-time pay – the first such arrangement affecting full-time employees in Australia to be formalised within an Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. Oxfam, which has 97 full-time and 37 part-time employees in Australia, of which…
Will the four-day work week become the new norm? A four-day working week is inching closer to reality for Oxfam workers, with the ASU and the organisation agreeing to a trial. While negotiations are yet to be finalised, it is expected that a pilot will be co-designed by management, staff, and the union and will…
The federal pre-election sales pitch budget has failed to provide any plan to increase real wages or deliver secure jobs. Scott Morrison and the Coalition Government has used $4 billion in unspent NDIS money to prop-up a budget surplus and at the same time have given tax cuts to people who earn over $200,000 a…
Weekends are as important as they have ever been. Did you know that in 1997 69.7% of us had jobs from Monday to Friday and in 2012 this figure was 68.9%? But there’s many of our members who are shift workers and work weekends, nights and public holidays when most Australians are enjoying time with…
In all the talk of age pensions, political deals and savings measures, we often forget the group in our society most negatively affected by cuts to safety nets: our women. Click here for full article in Working Life.
This year has started on a worrying note with Government Ministers blaming workers for receiving a decent, fair, living wage Industrial Relations Minister Eric Abetz recently said: “We risk seeing something akin to the ‘wages explosions’ of the pre-Accord era, when unsustainable wage growth simply pushed thousands of Australians out of work”. This belittles the very…
ASKED ”What will you be when you grow up?” Australian children would be expected to reply with any of a number of occupations: builder, doctor, pilot, teacher. It would be unusual, but far more realistic, for a child to call out customer service officer, business development consultant. The services sector employs more Australians than any…