Essential Workers Deserve Better

Invest in Essential Workers: Pay Rises, Secure Jobs, and hiring more staff

High quality services require good quality jobs. But after two years of the pandemic, essential workers are tired and worn down. Worse yet, their pay, conditions and job security is falling. They face a real pay cut of $6100 over the next three years and staff shortages are rising. If we as a state don’t provide decent careers in essential work, we won’t receive good quality public services.

The NSW Government must act:
• Invest in public services by growing their workers, ending the overwork and understaffing.
• Abolish unfair pay caps and lifts wages to keep up with the cost of living. Lifting wages will attract more workers to essential work, increase the reputation of essential work as providing a good and decent career, and lift the quality of public services as morale increases.
• Create more secure jobs in essential services. It is illogical that all workers in essential services are not offered full time permanent roles.
• Stop privatisation and ensure same-job same-pay in Government contracts. This will stop a race to the bottom where business compete on lower wages with insecure work. They do this to make their services cheaper to win Government contracts.

NSW is already falling behind, we must act urgently.

This call is backed by the research of Dr David Peetz, Professor Emeritus at the Griffith Business School of Griffith University Brisbane. His report can be found in full here.

Sign the petition calling on the NSW Government to act

Without high quality schools, TAFEs, hospitals, transport and essential services our state will go backwards. But high quality services require good quality jobs and the NSW Government just isn’t providing them. More buildings won’t fix this. Ambulance ramping times are increasing, there are critical staff shortages across our health system and there is critical shortages of teachers, especially in STEM areas which Australia’s economic future relies on.