We file a dispute with Waverley for failing to have a Consultative Committee operating for 30 months

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Published: Tuesday, 08 November 2022 09:45

When the Local Government State Award was made to operate from 1992, one of the significant achievements was the requirement that all councils have a Consultative Committee that would, for the first time, acknowledge the importance of employees having a say in things that affect their lives at work. There was some antagonism to this but it was a Federal Government initiative at a time the government thought cooperation in the workplace was essential. It was a big step, challenging the historic view of managerial prerogative trumping everything, it prescribed how a Committee should operate, who should sit on it, what it should do.

Now local government accepts it is an integral part of a modern workplace.

But while Waverley Council thought Council meetings could be held remotely during the pandemic, for reasons not properly explained, they thought that the Consultative Committee couldn’t. So they didn’t, unchallenged for 30 months. The last meeting was on 12 February 2020.

The unions, first separately, and then together, started raising it with People and Culture, the people who would normally be responsible for the management of the Consultative Committee. Those approaches were ignored by P&C, trying to fob us off with talk of the need to review the Constitution, it wasn’t their responsibility, the dog had eaten their homework, and even if it wasn’t their responsibility, they were very happy to stonewall.

Thirty months is a long time to not have a Consultative Committee meeting when the rest of the industry quite happily moved to remote meetings. They’ve still not explained how the Council could operate this way, but not the Consultative Committee, so we filed a dispute.

As a result of proceedings in the IRC on 27 September, the Council accepted they would start having the meetings, consistent with the requirement in the Constitution to meet on a certain day every month and the first meeting was held on 12 October. The first opportunity to meet consistent with the Constitution.

It was a dispute over something that no other Council had ever done, without anyone ever properly explaining how it happened, or whose decision it was. No one has put their hand up to own it.

The dispute also demonstrated the truism that there is a high correlation between councils caught doing the wrong thing and complaining about unions being intimidatory. Thirty months breaching the Award, they should have extracted as many fingers as they needed to respond to the unions requests immediately. Sprung. No wonder they felt intimidated, poor little loves.

It was refreshing to have the relatively new GM apologise to members of the Consultative Committee at the first meeting, but no one has put their hand up and said it was me, and it was a mistake. That fell to the GM, taking one for the team. Both kind and courageous of her.

The unions had identified eleven policies and protocols that had been varied, amended or changed in some way, including proposed changes in the job evaluation system, that should have ordinarily been through the Consultative Committee. A sad development for a Council that regards itself as progressive and consultative.