The Fair Work Commission handed down its decision on its investigation into the gender-based undervaluation of work in a handful of the disciplines covered by our Union. It is not an understatement to say that this has been a huge case in which our Union played a big role last year.
While lots of details around implementation are still being worked out, the key outcome is that the Fair Work Commission found in our favour, deciding that certain health professionals, including Medical Scientists, will get increases of 16-31% to the minimum national rates of pay contained in the Health Professionals and Support Services Award.
For certain other professions, including Lab Technicians, unfortunately things are a little less clear for the moment. We had pushed for these increases to apply to all health professionals covered by the national Award; however the Commission is essentially delineating between professions based on the minimum qualification required. Plus, they’ve decided that more work is needed to understand the work of a whole range of different types of technicians in the health space (e.g. pharmacy technicians, and a range of allied health technicians in fields like radiology or dialysis).
For the time being, lab technicians should “watch this space” and know that we are still going to work hard for you to get recognised for your work in the form of a fair pay rise, too.
What does this mean for members? The Award contains the minimum rates of pay that underpin our enterprise agreements. The base rates of pay in the enterprise agreements cannot fall below the base rates of pay in the Award. If they do, the higher Award rates apply instead. Because we’re talking about such a gigantic increase (at least for Scientists, for the moment) it is the expectation that our enterprise agreement rates of pay will increase substantially above and beyond the rates that were negotiated in bargaining, especially for those agreements already negotiated in the private sector.
What we don’t know just yet is the timing of the increases, or whether the increase will be phased in over a period of time. We’re still working in the Fair Work Commission to get these details straightened out, and we hope to have more information soon. However, we urge you to keep your eyes peeled for updates.
We have set up a page on our website where you can get more information and background on this very important investigation and decision by the Fair Work Commission. You can find the page on our site here: https://msav.org.au/health-professionals-and-gender-based-undervaluation/
