We met again with your employer late last week to progress negotiations on your new enterprise agreement. Here’s what you need to know:

We made I-MED commit to withdrawing their claim to reduce your redundancy entitlement, which is currently uncapped and includes partial payment of unused sick leave. This is because you made it loud and clear that your conditions need to go forward, not backward, and your voice matters!

Your HACSU bargaining team has also made I-MED agree to several important areas:

• A new classification structure for administrative and technical staff. I-MED said they will provide more clarity on the contact centre roles in the new administrative structure.

• Reviewing the discrepancy between the on-call standby rates with the view of trying to balance them between the north and south regions

• Creating a wellbeing leave entitlement that will give employees one non-cumulative day off per year

• Including a clause enabling employees to take unpaid leave for the purpose of affirming one’s gender

• Making the productivity bonus fairer by proposing to divide the north and north-west regions

Disappointingly, I-MED has flat-out rejected several of our claims, such as a fifth week of annual leave, workload allowance for when you’re understaffed, and a new foster/kinship leave entitlement.

They also have failed to provide the draft wording for several of their proposed clauses that they had promised, but they said they’ll do so at the next meeting in three weeks.

I-MED have also been vague about considering our claim for more personal leave and indicated that they want to address a number of our other leave claims via company policy – which means that they would not be strictly enforceable and I-MED can change them at will.

We’ll continue to push for these important issues in upcoming bargaining sessions.

I-MED have committed to putting a wage offer on the table at the next meeting. Before then, we’ll be out and about over the coming weeks to keep you up to date with agreement talks.

If you want to get in touch in the meanwhile, please email assist@hacsu.org.au or call 1300 880 032.