Transport for NSW/Roads & Maritime Services LISTENING

Transport for NSW/RMS Listening Meeting 14 Oct 2014 (PDF version)

Wentworth St, Parramatta, 14 October

Your union conducted a combined TfNSW/RMS listening meeting at Wentworth Street, Parramatta on Tuesday, 14 October 2014. The meeting was attended by staff from RMS and TfNSW at this site.

Thank you to all the participants at the meeting. You provided your union with valuable information on issues in your workplace and provided ideas which are currently being collated for inclusion in the ongoing Defending Public Services campaign against job cuts, privatisation and threats to working conditions.

Issues

The meeting identified that as a result of job cuts, staff freezes, redundancies and restructures:

• staff are forced to deal with excessive and increasing workloads. As a consequence, the back log of work has caused reduced service delivery and a significant rise in customer dissatisfaction and abuse. This in turn has led to low staff morale and fatigue.

• Work is KPI and “quantity over quality” driven with a reduction in attention to detail and the margin for error of increasing concern.

• Temporary and skills hire employees are utilised in some areas, but this is not a long term solution creating issues of continuity and training.

Your union recognises that it is essential that the members are provided with the tools to face these issues in the workplace.

Where to now?

While the listening meetings revealed some important issues, they also clearly demonstrated the importance of an organised and active workplace. The next step in the process is to establish a workplace organising committee at your workplace.

Your union proposes to hold a meeting in November at your worksite where we will identify training needs to enable members to be empowered in the workplace.

In conjunction with members, we will propose to set a timetable for lunch and learn training sessions and quarterly meetings for your workplace organising committee.