Today we held our second bargaining meeting with Capitol Health’s high paid corporate negotiators where they sat down to respond to your log of claims.
Frankly, their reply to your claims was both frustrating and baffling.
To cut to the chase, Capitol rejected almost all 22 of your claims for better wages and conditions, with a few small exceptions agreed to such as:
• Increasing parental leave to 12 weeks
• A paid day of study/exam leave
• A shared pool of 3 days’ training for Radiology Tasmania’s union delegates
Beyond these small fish, the word of the day from Capitol was NO – even on issues you’ve told us are important like a cannulation allowance and increases to your personal leave.
We were even more shocked when Capitol rejected your claim for a new skills classification structure as part of your agreement, instead saying that they’ll ‘finalise a structure sometime in the next year’ once the agreement is signed off.
This is practically unheard of when it comes to enterprise agreements – and with the way they’re acting we’re hesitant to take them on their promises.
Make no mistake, we’ll keep fighting for you to have an improved and transparent classification structure to make sure that your wages are consistent with, if not better, than other major employers in your industry – because you deserve to be recognised for your hard work and paid for it too.
They were also coy on a wage offer but jumped at the opportunity to cry poor about bulk billing – it may well be true, but we’re suspicious after their aggressiveness when we asked for some more information specific to Radiology Tasmania’s financial position to verify if their claims were true.
In an even stranger turn of events, Capitol representatives also seemed to suggest that our union somehow had control over the rate of Medicare indexation, and it was our fault that they’re hard done by.
We’re not affiliated to any political party, but even if we were, it’s not like we set the Medicare indexation rate.
What was clear is that Capitol have sent corporate bullies to bat for them today, and they’ve already planned to keep giving workers like you the bare minimum so millionaires like your CEO Justin Walter can keep lining their pockets.
All in all, it was a disappointing meeting, and we’ll need to chat to you more early next year so we can come up with a plan about what we’ll be doing moving forward – so make sure you keep an eye out for us over the next few weeks.
Negotiating an enterprise agreement is supposed to leave you better than the Award, and it looks like we’ll be fighting tooth and nail to make sure that’s the case. Together if we stay united and stand up to their tactics, we can make sure that you’re better off.