No more double shifts: Fed up West Australian nurses launch action

It looked on Tuesday night like an eleventh-hour bid by the McGowan government to stave off work bans by nurses would fail; and it seems we are about to find out just how thinly spread WA’s public hospital workforce is.

The Australian Nursing Federation will proceed with industrial action on Wednesday, beginning with a ban on the practice of double shifts.

Then a week later, unless the deadlock can be resolved, action will escalate to a ban on overtime and potentially more, including bans on accepting patients above hospital capacity and day-long rolling stoppages from hospital to hospital.

The union believes as many as one in five hospital beds could end up closed.

It has been pushing for more money, but also for more nurses in the system.

Its membership is worn out and strung out, keeping a system with razor-thin margins going on goodwill that is just about at its end.

The Australian Nursing Federation voted to organise escalating industrial action last Wednesday.Credit: Cameron Myles

At Perth Children’s Hospital, they have not forgotten how staff on shift the night Aishwarya Aswath died were hung out to dry after months of warnings to management that staffing was routinely too thin.

Guaranteed nurse-to-patient ratios has been a focus of the union’s campaigning for some years.

They want one nurse to four patients on morning and afternoon shifts and one to seven patients on night shifts.

At a rowdy stop-work meeting at a packed Perth Convention and Exhibition Centre last week, they also demanded a 10 per cent pay rise from the floor.

Union powerbroker Mark Olson – the polarising union secretary for 24 years before moving to a newly created role of chief executive – acknowledged at the weekend 10 per cent was overs but would not back down from demanding the reform that would relieve the pressure his members face on the wards.

Nurses protesting wages and nurse-to-patient ratios in Perth last week.Credit: Cameron Myles

While the government has stuck to its offer of 3 per cent pay rises for two years and a one-off $3000 bonus, it relented on guaranteed ratios, offering a framework to be enshrined in a new EBA.

The offer, though, has blown up in its face amid fresh recriminations from each side.

Janet Reah, the ANF secretary who on Monday night was hours away from learning whether she had been elected by the membership as Olson’s handpicked successor, went nuclear in a note to nurses, titled “Government insults ANF members”, and obtained by 6PR and WAtoday.

Her complaint was that the government’s offer, which she described as a “leaflet” for its brevity, was sent to The West Australian newspaper, which published it before it was sent to the union, setting off the new firestorm.

“Earlier this afternoon, the government sent their public sector EBA offer to a journalist at The West Australian and an article with details about the offer appeared online at 8pm and will be on the front page tomorrow,” Reah wrote.

“Thirty minutes later at 8.30pm the government finally sent their offer to the ANF.”

Attached was the government’s nine-clause draft EBA provision for nurse-to-patient ratios.

While it enshrines the figures of 4:1 daytime and 7:1 nighttime ratios, it also says the model would be “phased” over three years, or, as Reah noted: “after the 2025 state election … how convenient for the government.”

There is also a draft clause that says: “The parties acknowledge current national and global workforce pressures and the impacts this may have on the employer’s ability to implement the WA ratio model.”

Combined, the union argues the clauses render the ratio offer meaningless.

While the union fumed at the newspaper leak, the government had its own explanation for the tactic.

On Tuesday morning, Premier Mark McGowan told reporters the Australian Nursing Federation had cancelled a Monday meeting with Health Minister Amber-Jade Sanderson and refused to take her call, meaning it had no choice but to communicate the offer to nurses via the press.

Reah later admitted she had screened the minister but said it would have been inappropriate to negotiate with her given the results of the union members’ ballot had been due Tuesday morning.

That ballot, meanwhile, might be its own story.

Reah defeated rival Samantha Fenn by just 56 votes of 4400 cast.

The federation’s membership is more than 35,000 strong and Fenn claims some members have complained they never received a ballot paper. She is seeking advice about whether the ballot can be challenged and a fresh election called.

Meanwhile the other union that represents nurses, the UWU, which is aligned to Sanderson and the most dominant faction inside WA Labor, is set to accept the government’s 3 per cent/$3000 offer.

UWU-represented nurses agreed to the deal with a resounding 97 per cent vote in favour.

The disparity with the ANF position is stark.

At 5pm last night Reah finally met Sanderson and it seems the deadlock remains. But if the union holds the line, we are all about to get a lesson in what really makes the system go around.

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