Your bargaining team met yesterday with Calvary’s mainland based corporate negotiators to try and progress talks on your Calvary nursing agreement.

At the meeting, Calvary spoke a lot about “striking the right balance” when it comes to your pay rise, and the best they could come up with was 3% for each year of the agreement, with backpay from 1 July 2022.

We wonder who the low-ball wage offer strikes the right balance for when rental and housing prices in Tasmania have sky-rocketed over the past 5 years?

What about the balance of other cost of living pressures like groceries and fuel prices that are through the roof for working people?

Your bargaining team thinks this balancing act will see the agreement fall face first.

Calvary’s miserly wage offer comes after they rejected almost all your claims about special pandemic leave, reproductive leave, set rules for breastfeeding in the workplace and a workload allowance for when you’re understaffed. They’re also looking to whittle away at entitlements like purchased leave.

We were however pleased to hear that at least they were willing to make small increases to your night shift penalties and provide some further information about their proposed structure for introducing AINs – but these concessions alone hardly strike the balance that workers need.

You deserve to be valued by your employer for the important work you do. We know how tough you’ve been doing it and Calvary needs to get serious about giving you a fair pay rise that reflects this.

We’ll be visiting you in the coming weeks to talk to you about what the next steps together look like from here.

If you have any questions in the meantime, you can contact me on 1300 880 032 or via email at assist@hacsu.org.au