Child Protection Award – Off and Running

One element of the settlement of this year’s salaries case for all NSW public sector workers was the side agreement that your Union and DCJ would negotiate, for the first time ever, a specific Award for Child Protection employees.

Awards are neither what they sound like nor necessarily exciting business.  What we hope to gain from this process however could revolutionise your working lives.

A Child Protection Award will be a unique industrial instrument just for Community Services that supplements your current terms and conditions of employment but adds specific protections and rights.

Delegates and representatives of your Union met with Department representatives for the first-time last week to commence negotiations towards this Award.

At the moment we envisage it will include clear and revised position descriptions which will guide new classifications and gradings, as well as properly incorporating a fair and reasonable measure of your workload allocation which aligns with your hours of work.

In the coming weeks we will be asking interested members from specific roles to be part of working parties to provide input into what each position description should look like.

In the meantime, it would be greatly appreciated if you could take the couple of minutes to complete the attached survey so that we are better informed about what you would like to see introduced.  You can take the survey here

It is clear there is a mountain of work to do to get Community Services to a position where it provides you with a workplace and conditions that addresses their current workforce crisis.

Stay tuned as we leave no stone unturned towards this goal in 2025.