Darcy Vescio speaks out for ‘minority’ on AFLW pay dispute as Daisy Pearce airs concerns
Darcy Vescio says the minority group that rejected the AFLW collective bargaining agreement was “pushing” for what is best for all players, but Daisy Pearce believes some were “possibly” influenced to vote a particular way by club delegates.
Women's sport
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Darcy Vescio has declared “minority voices are essential” as the AFL Women’s pay and conditions stalemate wears on.
The Carlton star is among 30 per cent of players who have rejected a three-year deal on the table for 2020-2022 with talks set to be reignited with players who opposed the offer this week.
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Like any good footy, high percentage plays are important, but so are the 1%ers (30 is wild)
— Darcy Vescio (@darcyvee) October 9, 2019
Pushing to get the best possible outcome for all. Diversity of opinion is vital in any decision making and minority voices are essential.
I too have 2020 vision
(with glasses on) #aflw
And she says the group is “pushing” for what is best for all players.
“Like any good footy, high percentage plays are important, but so are the 1%ers (30 is wild),” the spectacled forward tweeted on Wednesday night.
“Pushing to get the best possible outcome for all. Diversity of opinion is vital in any decision making and minority voices are essential.
”I too have 2020 vision (with glasses on).”
Meanwhile, star Daisy Pearce has voiced concerns players were “possibly” influenced to vote a particular way by their club delegates.
Pearce — an inaugural marquee player at Melbourne — said the delegate system could be partly to blame for the recent collective bargaining agreement vote result.
Each club has two AFL Players’ Association delegates who are often tasked with relaying information from meetings back to players at their club.
But Pearce said that was a potential issue with the vote failing to pass.
“Potentially (the delegate system hasn’t worked). I don’t know if that sounds accusatory, but I believe that the 30 per cent that voted ‘no’ would have been influenced by the way that that information was delivered to them,” Pearce said.
“If you look at the way the votes came through … it sounds like there were a few clubs that were very strongly ‘no’, and so that was an outlier in that most other clubs only had ‘yes’ or a mix, whereas some clubs were heavily influenced ‘no’.
“Possibly (the messaging from the particular delegate may have led the respective playing groups). That probably sounds accusatory, but I guess it’s a fair assumption given the way the data has fell.”
Meetings are set to be held to ascertain why players who opposed the deal had done so.
“It’ll be about the PA getting in front of a bigger group of players,” Pearce said on SEN.
“Rather than relying on a system where you’re in front of delegates and the delegates feed that information back to clubs, I think they’ll aim get in front of a bigger group of players. Starting with the clubs that were highly concentrated with people that were unhappy.”
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Before having last season off as she carried twins Sylvie and Roy, Pearce fell in the top tier of women’s players.
She is endeavouring to return to the game for the 2020 season having last month returned to full training — five months after the twins were born.
Tier one players are set to earn $29,856 under the proposed deal, and are also excluded from club limits on additional services agreements which allows them to potentially earn thousands from arrangements external to their club.
It is not yet known whether Pearce will be one of the Demons’ nominated Tier 1 players in 2020.
Pearce said she had felt like she had enough information provided to her to support the deal, and said that she was confident that a deal would be done.
“I don’t have the expectation that everything that goes down within the negotiation and all the details … I don’t feel like every single bit of it needs to be written in a CBA document,” she said on SEN.
“To me … high-level information like pay and dates and real ‘meaty’ information goes into a CBA. A lot of the other conversation that goes on in terms of commitment about communication processes moving forward, other commitments from the AFL in terms of where this competition’s heading, the vision for the comp … I don’t need to see it in writing.
“To me, it’s about building relationships with different stakeholders and having trust that if the AFL Players’ Association tell us that moving forward ‘we’re going to improve communications in this way and that way because we’ve acknowledged there’s some challenges with communicating with part-time girls’, I trust that they’ll do that.
“And that trust is built on the back of three years where they’ve represented us really well and were really proactive with getting on the front foot in doing so from the outset of this competition.
“If Gill (McLachlan), Steve Hocking and Nicole Livingstone come and sit before us in one of these meetings and discuss their rationale for why and why not on some of the details on this, I listen and take that information and trust that that’s how it will play out. I don’t need to see it written down, so I don’t need any more information.”
Originally published as Darcy Vescio speaks out for ‘minority’ on AFLW pay dispute as Daisy Pearce airs concerns