Welcome to new members who joined HACSU in the last month! You’re a part of something bigger and are helping to contribute to improving our health and community services sectors!

We’re motivated by amazing women in March! This month, we celebrated International Women’s Day with our Inaugural HACSU Women’s Forum and we’re writing all about women in this month’s newsletter! We had some great feedback from the event, with all of attendees agreeing that they would like to attend future events! There was plenty of invigorating discussion and some empowering speakers who presented on the day. We’re not in the process of formulating a plan moving forward so if you’d like to be involved in this movement, please get in touch hacsu@hacsu.asn.au

We also celebrated the great work of our social work members on World Social Work Day and visited the Migrant Workers Centre at Trades Hall during Cultural Diversity Week! Click below to watch a video that explains more about the great work done and the resources available at the Migrant Workers Centre.

Coming up in April we have a plenty of public holidays including Easter and ANZAC Day. Check out our handy public holiday calendar you can print to share at your workplace for more information.

Don’t forget we’ve still got some great upcoming training available for all HACSU member! Click here for a downloadable copy of the HACSU 2019 Training Calendar or contact us for more information.

It’s been a big month in for our mental health members. Our nurses and PSOs receive a pay increase during the first full pay period on or after April 1st 2019. Due to the success of our last EBA campaign, this year, our nurses won increases of between 5-18%!

You can read more about what’s happening in the mental health sector here.

For those of you who are currently working at one of the organisations signed with Jobs Australia regarding the Multi-Employer Agreement, please know that we are continually working on this in the background and we’ll get back to you with any further updates as they become available!

We’ve also received an update regarding the Colanda Disability Houses. The final round of voluntary departure packages were released last week with two exit dates being July 6th and the 2nd date at closure or as needed. One of the new houses opened last week and another will open in early April. The remainder are scheduled to be open by November with final closure then occurring about 5-6 months after they were scheduled to close.

We’ve had more good news for one of our members working at a mental health service who is receiving a huge back payment after her pay was unfairly withheld in January. Due to historical issues with payment of overtime, in our last Mental Health EBA (2016-2020) HACSU was able to secure the Delays in processing pay Clause (62.4) which relates to mentla health nurses and stipulates:

“…if an Employee is kept waiting for longer than the close of business on the business day following notification by the Employee to Payroll of an underpayment or non-payment under clause 62.2 or 62.3, the Employee will be paid overtime rates for the duration of the period until such moneys owing are paid with a minimum payment of two hours and a maximum payment of seven hours and 36 minutes per day”.

Our member Catherine, who was not paid penalty rates on a shift in January, dutifully alerted payroll of the issue within 24 hours of it occurring and then had her manager alert payroll as she did not receive an adequate response. Catherine then involved the union in February.

With help from Area Organiser Angela, Catherine managed to secure back payment of all shifts worked since the initial under payment, to be paid as overtime from January until now. Whilst we're still awaiting the exact amount Catherine will receive, we're estimating it will be close to a whopping $7,500!

Congratulations to Catherine and Angela on this amazing outcome! Don’t forget that the higher the union density in a workplace, the more power we have as a union to clauses such as these in your EBA! Talk to your colleagues today about how a HACSU membership pays for itself!