NDIS carers brace for pay and conditions battle

An IR battle is brewing as unions, business groups and NDIS clients thrash out working conditions for carers.

An industrial relations battle is brewing as unions, business groups and people who will benefit from the $22 billion National Disability Insurance Scheme meet to thrash out ways “serious litigation” can be avoided while delivering a service revolution.

The Fair Work Commission will hold meetings this month and next with the Health Services Union, United Voice, the Australian Services Union and the peak provider body National Disability Services to discuss “innovative employment solutions” around the NDIS to avoid “serious litigation” over the carers award.

The meetings will be held in parallel with a four-year review to which unions and employers are making submissions about how and whether the Social, Community, Home Care and Disability Services Award 2010 should change.

Only about 2 per cent of people in the NDIS trials manage their own funding despite early projections of a dramatic overhaul, but the brewing battle over workplace conditions will pit workers against some of the most vulnerable people in society who, like small businesses now, demand flexibility.

The Health Services Union seeks a minimum shift of four hours for employees, double the current minimum for disability workers and four times longer than the minimum for home-care and aged-care workers. Employer groups seek more flexibility with broken shifts, minimum hours and notice periods for rostering, all of which will be opposed by unions.

Unions have applied for the cost of travel time — for workers who must visit several clients in a day — to be included in the award.

“One of the biggest problems ... is that all of the parties are negotiating without any of the information available to us or even knowing what this thing (the NDIS) is going to look like,” one person familiar with the discussions said. “The (National Disability Insurance Agency) has not actually provided very much data, they won’t release the detail and are keeping their cards very close to their chest.”

The agency initially predicted the disability workforce would ­almost double to 120,000 workers under the NDIS but estimates now predict 150,000 workers.

The Fair Work Commission meetings have not been publicised and parties involved were reluctant to discuss them, but one told The Weekend Australian there were “concerns about whether the award as it stands can live up to the promise of choice and control for people with disabilities”.

The NDIS was touted as turning people receiving individual packages of support into employers, able to hire and fire their own support workers and schedule them as needed. However, the ­reality is more complicated.

In a submission to a Victorian government inquiry into labour hire and insecure work, RMIT University professors Fiona McDonald and Sara Charles­worth warned of worsening conditions for workers with the current NDIS changes. “The likely consequences for low-paid care workers are further fragmentation of employment arrangements, undercutting of minimum pay and conditions and further distancing of these vulnerable workers from collective representation,” they said.