Today (20 June 2024) we had a fourth mind-boggling conference at the Fair Work Commission to try and resolve the dispute over your wages.
As you know, many members have indicated that they do disability support work in SIL homes and should be paid as disability support workers. Complete, however, have refused to pay you as disability support workers and instead made their own rates of pay.
Your enterprise agreement and the law basically says that you cannot be paid less than an equivalent SCHCDS Award worker. The requirement for employers is to identify what is the appropriate comparison SCHCDS Award classification and make sure their workers are not paid less than that classification and level. Complete, however, just don’t get this – they are maintaining that they don’t have to do any comparison with the SCHCDS Award and can go on merrily paying you however they see fit.
We think Complete is hamming it up in the Commission and just pretending they don’t know what to do. In reality, they know full well what they are doing because they are deliberately removing anyone that may be paid at a higher level from working in SIL homes.
The Commission appears as frustrated as we are with their antics and demanded that they bring their lawyer to the next conference so that we may engage with someone who understands what they are meant to do.
In the meantime, we will need to speak with all of you to see if you are prepared to make witness statements about the work that you do and the environment in which you do it. Complete have indicated that no employee will be adversely affected as a result of making a claim.
It’s like pulling teeth, but we are determined that the ongoing wage theft is corrected.