TasWater - something in the water?

03 April 2024

Workers rights and conditions are under attack!

TasWater’s approach to Enterprise Bargaining is one which has the intent to divide and conquer and remove hard fought for employment conditions. Splitting Enterprise Agreement coverage without consulting and additionally taking employees off the Senior EA onto negotiated contracts is another way to weaken conditions, dodge transparency and create an environment of secret pay deals.

Further, TasWater is entering bargaining in a hostile way with lack of communication with all unions, failing to respond to emails and again trying to cause division before the first meeting has even been held.

The first TasWater bargaining meeting was scheduled to commence this week, but due to a dispute that TasWater has raised, questioning the CFMEU ability to be a bargaining representative for its members (this may impact the Notice of Representational Rights), the Single Bargaining Unit (SBU) consisting of the AMWU, ASU, AWU, CEPU, CFMEU, CPSU and Professionals Australia decided not to attend.

Legal advice is being sought and the outcome of this issue should be known by the end of next week and in time for the next scheduled meeting.

The SBU wants to make sure that workers who want to be represented by a union during negotiations are afforded that right. And we want TasWater to start playing fair.